We analyze the rank-frequency distributions of words in selected English and Polish texts. We show that for the lemmatized (basic) word forms the scale-invariant regime breaks after about two decades, while it might be consistent for the whole range of ranks for the inflected word forms. We also find that for a corpus consisting of texts written by different authors the basic scale-invariant regime is broken more strongly than in the case of comparable corpus consisting of texts written by the same author. Similarly, for a corpus consisting of texts translated into Polish from other languages the scale-invariant regime is broken more strongly than for a comparable corpus of native Polish texts. Moreover, we find that if the words are tagged with their proper part of speech, only verbs show rank-frequency distribution that is almost scale-invariant.
@article{arxiv.1007.0936,
title = {Linguistic complexity: English vs. Polish, text vs. corpus},
author = {Jaroslaw Kwapien and Stanislaw Drozdz and Adam Orczyk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.0936},
year = {2010}
}