A Model for Function Word Counts

B. J. R. Bailey

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, 1990, vol. 39, issue 1, 107-114

Abstract: Researchers in linguistics have considered an author's use of function words, or context‐free words, as providing one measure of his style. The number of occurrences of a single word, such as ‘and‘, or an uncommon group of words, in a fixed sample of n words, can often be modelled by a binomial distribution. However, this model sometimes breaks down for more common groups of words, such as all the articles, a group of pronouns etc. For such cases, a more realistic model is presented and analysed, based on a simple Markov chain model of English usage.

Date: 1990
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