Beyond the Zipf-Mandelbrot law in Quantitative Linguistics
Abstract
In this paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity Zipf-Mandelbrot law can only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the total number of words contained in some given corpus. In particular, we focus our attention on the important deviations that become statistically relevant as larger corpora are considered and that ultimately could be understood as salient features of the underlying complex process of language generation. Finally, a complete quantitative framework is presented within which all the different observed regimes can be encompassed accurately by a single mathematical expression.Keywords
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