Lotka phenomenon in the words’ syntactic distribution complexity

Dongbo Wang (), Danhao Zhu and Xinning Su
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Dongbo Wang: Nanjing University
Danhao Zhu: Nanjing University
Xinning Su: Nanjing University

Scientometrics, 2012, vol. 90, issue 2, No 10, 483-498

Abstract: Abstract To better understand the distribution of words in all kinds of syntactic structures, the paper calculates the word distribution in syntactic structures of both English and Chinese. On the basis of the calculation, the article presents the definition of the words’ syntactic distribution complexity. After arranging the Chinese and English words according to their own syntactic distribution complexity, respectively, the Lotka phenomenon can be clearly attested by the results. The discovery made in the paper reveals the law of the words’ syntactic distribution in linguistic studies on one hand and the statistically proven fact that Chinese words’ syntax is much more complex than that of the English after comparing the Lotka phenomenon of both Chinese and English words’ syntactic distribution complexity on the other hand.

Keywords: Words’ syntactic distribution complexity; Lotka phenomenon; Treebank (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-011-0546-z

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