Two Regimes in the Frequency of Words and the Origins of Complex Lexicons: Zipf's Law Revisited

Ramon Ferrer Cancho and Ricard V. Solé

Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute

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, \approx (-)1 for the first regime and \approx (-)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.

Date: 2000-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wop:safiwp:00-12-068

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Krichel ().