Two Regimes in the Frequency of Words and the Origins of Complex Lexicons: Zipf’s Law Revisited∗
- 1 December 2001
- journal article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Quantitative Linguistics
- Vol. 8 (3) , 165-173
- https://doi.org/10.1076/jqul.8.3.165.4101
Abstract
Zipf’s law states that the frequency of a word is a power function of its rank. The exponent of the power is usually accepted to be close to (-)1. Great deviations between the predicted and real number of different words of a text, disagreements between the predicted and real exponent of the probability density function and statistics on a big corpus, make evident that word frequency as a function of the rank follows two different exponents, ˜(-)1 for the first regime and ˜(-)2 for the second. The implications of the change in exponents for the metrics of texts and for the origins of complex lexicons are analyzed.Keywords
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