Search Results (3)

Bottlenose dolphins’ broadband click vocalisations are well-studied in the literature concerning their echolocation function. Their potential use for communication among conspecifics has long been speculated but has yet to be conclusively established. In this study, we first categorised dolphins’ click production based on their amplitude contour and then analysed the distribution of individual clicks and click sequences against their duration and length. The results show that the repertoire and composition of clicks and click sequences adhere to the three essential linguistic laws of efficient communication: Zipf’s rank–frequency law, the law of brevity, and the Menzerath–Altmann law. Conforming to the rank–frequency law suggests that clicks may form a linguistic code subject to selective pressures for unification, on the one hand, and diversification, on the other. Conforming to the other two laws also implies that dolphins use clicks according to the compression criterion or minimisation of code length without losing information. Such conformity of dolphin clicks might indicate that these linguistic laws are more general, which produces an exciting research perspective on animal communication. Full article

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) is more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study examines a more diverse sample of languages than the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters and in phonemes (for some of the languages), as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show different correlations between word length and the corpus-based measure for different languages. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, by the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions. Full article

An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no unified framework that encompasses all them. This paper presents a new perspective to establish a connection between different statistical linguistic laws. Characterizing each word type by two random variables—length (in number of characters) and absolute frequency—we show that the corresponding bivariate joint probability distribution shows a rich and precise phenomenology, with the type-length and the type-frequency distributions as its two marginals, and the conditional distribution of frequency at fixed length providing a clear formulation for the brevity-frequency phenomenon. The type-length distribution turns out to be well fitted by a gamma distribution (much better than with the previously proposed lognormal), and the conditional frequency distributions at fixed length display power-law-decay behavior with a fixed exponent $\alpha \simeq 1.4$ and a characteristic-frequency crossover that scales as an inverse power $\delta \simeq 2.8$ of length, which implies the fulfillment of a scaling law analogous to those found in the thermodynamics of critical phenomena. As a by-product, we find a possible model-free explanation for the origin of Zipf’s law, which should arise as a mixture of conditional frequency distributions governed by the crossover length-dependent frequency. Full article