Cargando…
Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
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...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2012
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3517984/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23230508 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep00943 |
_version_ | 1782252502667755520 |
---|---|
author | Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž |
author_facet | Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž |
author_sort | Petersen, Alexander M. |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3517984 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2012 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-35179842012-12-10 Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž Sci Rep Article 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. Nature Publishing Group 2012-12-10 /pmc/articles/PMC3517984/ /pubmed/23230508 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep00943 Text en Copyright © 2012, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
title | Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
title_full | Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
title_fullStr | Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
title_full_unstemmed | Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
title_short | Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
title_sort | languages cool as they expand: allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3517984/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23230508 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep00943 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT petersenalexanderm languagescoolastheyexpandallometricscalingandthedecreasingneedfornewwords AT tenenbaumjoeln languagescoolastheyexpandallometricscalingandthedecreasingneedfornewwords AT havlinshlomo languagescoolastheyexpandallometricscalingandthedecreasingneedfornewwords AT stanleyheugene languagescoolastheyexpandallometricscalingandthedecreasingneedfornewwords AT percmatjaz languagescoolastheyexpandallometricscalingandthedecreasingneedfornewwords |