Affiliation:
1. Instituto de Física Enrique Gaviola, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Ciudad Universitaria, 5000 Córdoba, Pcia. de Córdoba, Argentina
2. Centro Atómico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro, Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica and Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Av. Bustillo 9500, 8400 San Carlos de Bariloche, Pcia. de Río Negro, Argentina
Abstract
We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of 75 literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ‘tags,’ namely,
nouns
,
verbs
and
others
), and analyse the progressive appearance of new words of each tag along each individual text. We find that, as prescribed by Heaps’ Law, vocabulary sizes and text lengths follow a well-defined power-law relation. Meanwhile, the appearance of new words in each text does not obey a power law, and is on the whole well described by the average of random shufflings of the text. Deviations from this average, however, are statistically significant and show systematic trends across the corpus. Specifically, we find that the appearance of new words along each text is predominantly retarded with respect to the average of random shufflings. Moreover, different tags add systematically distinct contributions to this tendency, with
verbs
and
others
being respectively more and less retarded than the mean trend, and
nouns
following instead the overall mean. These statistical systematicities are likely to point to the existence of linguistically relevant information stored in the different variants of Heaps’ Law, a feature that is still in need of extensive assessment.
Cited by
6 articles.
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