Petersen, Alexander M. and Tenenbaum, Joel and Havlin, Shlomo and Stanley, H. Eugene and Perc, Matjaz Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words. Scientific Reports, 2 (943). pp. 1-10. ISSN 2045-2322 (2012)
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Abstract
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two scaling regimes characterize the word frequency distributions, with only the more common words obeying the classic Zipf law. Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling relation between the corpus size and the vocabulary size of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words, a feature that is likely related to the underlying correlations between words. We calculate the annual growth fluctuations of word use which has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion. This ‘‘cooling pattern’’ forms the basis of a third statistical regularity, which unlike the Zipf and the Heaps law, is dynamical in nature.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Identification Number: | 10.1038/srep00943 |
| Subjects: | Q Science > Q Science (General) Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z665 Library Science. Information Science |
| Research Area: | Economics and Institutional Change |
| Depositing User: | Alexander Petersen |
| Date Deposited: | 17 May 2013 08:25 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Nov 2013 11:43 |
| URI: | http://eprints.imtlucca.it/id/eprint/1585 |
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