Related papers: Universal versus system-specific features of punct…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
This study re-evaluates the assumption that long-range correlations in sentence length are a fundamental feature of natural language and a marker of literary style. While previous research has suggested that punctuation marks--particularly…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
A word $u=u_1\dots u_n$ is a scattered factor of a word $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters: there exist the (potentially empty) words $v_0,v_1,..,v_n$ such that $w = v_0u_1v_1...u_nv_n$. The set of all…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin…
Human syntactic structures are usually represented as graphs. Much research has focused on the mapping between such graphs and linguistic sequences, but less attention has been paid to the shapes of the graphs themselves: their topologies.…
The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…
In this paper we build on earlier observations and theory regarding word length frequency and sequential distribution to develop a mathematical characterization of some of the language features distinguishing isometrically lineated text…
We discuss the notion of privileged word, recently introduced by Peltomaki. A word w is privileged if it is of length <=1, or has a privileged border that occurs exactly twice in w. We prove the following results: (1) if w^k is privileged…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…
Complex networks provide powerful tools for analyzing and understanding the intricate structures present in various systems, including natural language. Here, we analyze topology of growing word-adjacency networks constructed from Chinese…
Proverbs are an essential component of language and culture, and though much attention has been paid to their history and currency, there has been comparatively little quantitative work on changes in the frequency with which they are used…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
This document presents Annotated English, a system of diacritical symbols which turns English pronunciation into a precise and unambiguous process. The annotations are defined and located in such a way that the original English text is not…
Over the past two centuries, the frequency of word usage in major Western languages has exhibited small amplitude regular cycles, superimposed on larger background trends. We show that these cycles of word usage organize into semantically…