Related papers: Variation of sentence length across time and genre
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…
The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but…
Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening…
Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article. Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied. It was found out that average word…
Hedges are widely studied across registers and disciplines, yet research on the translation of hedges in political texts is extremely limited. This contrastive study is dedicated to investigating whether there is a diachronic change in the…
Sentence simplification aims to make sentences easier to read and understand. Recent approaches have shown promising results with sequence-to-sequence models which have been developed assuming homogeneous target audiences. In this paper we…
Mixing dependency lengths from sequences of different length is a common practice in language research. However, the empirical distribution of dependency lengths of sentences of the same length differs from that of sentences of varying…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
This discussion paper reflects on how quantitative approaches to historical linguistics interact with dataset properties. Drawing on two worked examples, we examine English data using quad-based concept modelling of Early Modern English…
This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…
This chapter argues for more informed target metrics for the statistical processing of stylistic variation in text collections. Much as operationalised relevance proved a useful goal to strive for in information retrieval, research in…
We use large language models (LLMs) to uncover long-ranged structure in English texts from a variety of sources. The conditional entropy or code length in many cases continues to decrease with context length at least to $N\sim 10^4$…
In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands…
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…
This paper presents analysis of 30 literary texts written in English by different authors. For each text, there were created time series representing length of sentences in words and analyzed its fractal properties using two methods of…
We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of $75$ literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it…
The topic of "negative end" of change is, contrary to the fields of innovation and emergence, largely under-researched. Yet, it has lately started to gain an increasing attention from language scholars worldwide. The main focus of this…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from…
A two-parameter model of word length measured by the number of syllables comprising it is proposed. The first parameter is dependent on language type, the second one - on text genre and reflects the degree of completion of synergetic…