Word length, sentence length and frequency : Zipf's law revisited
(2004) In Studia Linguistica 58(1). p.37-52- Abstract
- This paper examines data from English, Swedish and German in order to find a theoretical distribution that describes the observed relation between word length and frequency. In Swedish and English, most word tokens consist of three letters only, while shorter or longer words occur less frequently. We found that the equation with the general form fexp = a * Lb * cL (a variant of the so-called gamma distribution) approximates the observed frequencies reasonably well. This formula incorporates both the fact that the number of possible words increases with word length, and the fact that longer words tend to be avoided, presumably because they are uneconomic. To our knowledge this formula has not been proposed to describe word frequency data.... (More)
- This paper examines data from English, Swedish and German in order to find a theoretical distribution that describes the observed relation between word length and frequency. In Swedish and English, most word tokens consist of three letters only, while shorter or longer words occur less frequently. We found that the equation with the general form fexp = a * Lb * cL (a variant of the so-called gamma distribution) approximates the observed frequencies reasonably well. This formula incorporates both the fact that the number of possible words increases with word length, and the fact that longer words tend to be avoided, presumably because they are uneconomic. To our knowledge this formula has not been proposed to describe word frequency data. We examined frequency distributions of word length in Swedish and English, and explored different variants of the equation by systematically varying the a, b and c parameters. Subsequently, we also applied the formula to the frequency distribution of sentence length in English, and found an almost perfect fit for a corpus consisting of different text genres. Moreover, the data showed that the formula can be used to distinguish between different kinds of text genres. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/161894
- author
- Sigurd, Bengt LU ; Eeg-Olofsson, Mats LU and van de Weijer, Joost LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2004
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- published
- subject
- keywords
- length frequency
- in
- Studia Linguistica
- volume
- 58
- issue
- 1
- pages
- 37 - 52
- publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell
- external identifiers
-
- wos:000220654000003
- scopus:13244251170
- ISSN
- 1467-9582
- DOI
- 10.1111/j.0039-3193.2004.00109.x
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- additional info
- The information about affiliations in this record was updated in December 2015. The record was previously connected to the following departments: Linguistics and Phonetics (015010003)
- id
- c4d5330e-e441-4776-a7a7-de0418859186 (old id 161894)
- date added to LUP
- 2016-04-01 15:30:50
- date last changed
- 2023-11-28 08:27:24
@article{c4d5330e-e441-4776-a7a7-de0418859186, abstract = {{This paper examines data from English, Swedish and German in order to find a theoretical distribution that describes the observed relation between word length and frequency. In Swedish and English, most word tokens consist of three letters only, while shorter or longer words occur less frequently. We found that the equation with the general form fexp = a * Lb * cL (a variant of the so-called gamma distribution) approximates the observed frequencies reasonably well. This formula incorporates both the fact that the number of possible words increases with word length, and the fact that longer words tend to be avoided, presumably because they are uneconomic. To our knowledge this formula has not been proposed to describe word frequency data. We examined frequency distributions of word length in Swedish and English, and explored different variants of the equation by systematically varying the a, b and c parameters. Subsequently, we also applied the formula to the frequency distribution of sentence length in English, and found an almost perfect fit for a corpus consisting of different text genres. Moreover, the data showed that the formula can be used to distinguish between different kinds of text genres.}}, author = {{Sigurd, Bengt and Eeg-Olofsson, Mats and van de Weijer, Joost}}, issn = {{1467-9582}}, keywords = {{length frequency}}, language = {{eng}}, number = {{1}}, pages = {{37--52}}, publisher = {{Wiley-Blackwell}}, series = {{Studia Linguistica}}, title = {{Word length, sentence length and frequency : Zipf's law revisited}}, url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0039-3193.2004.00109.x}}, doi = {{10.1111/j.0039-3193.2004.00109.x}}, volume = {{58}}, year = {{2004}}, }