{"title":"The effects of type and token frequency on word length: a cross-linguistic study","authors":"T. Berg, Peter Zörnig, Charlotte Lehr","doi":"10.1515/glot-2022-2007","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Inspired by Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, previous research was mostly directed at the interaction of word length and token frequency. Much less is known about the relationship of word length and type frequency, let alone about the differential impact of type and token frequency on word length. These issues are examined on the basis of a non-representative sample of 10 languages. The token frequency analysis reveals that 8 of the 10 languages show a monotonic decrease in frequency with increasing length while 2 languages reveal a unimodal distribution. By contrast, all 10 languages exhibit a rise followed by a monotonic drop of the frequency curve in the type frequency analysis. There appears to be a notable effect of type frequency on the nature of the token frequency distribution: the greater the average length of the words in the lexicon, the higher the probability of a unimodal distribution. Two principles are required to account for these results—a general dispreference for using long words and a language-particular dispreference for short words in the lexicon.","PeriodicalId":37792,"journal":{"name":"Glottotheory","volume":"13 1","pages":"173 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Glottotheory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/glot-2022-2007","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Abstract Inspired by Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, previous research was mostly directed at the interaction of word length and token frequency. Much less is known about the relationship of word length and type frequency, let alone about the differential impact of type and token frequency on word length. These issues are examined on the basis of a non-representative sample of 10 languages. The token frequency analysis reveals that 8 of the 10 languages show a monotonic decrease in frequency with increasing length while 2 languages reveal a unimodal distribution. By contrast, all 10 languages exhibit a rise followed by a monotonic drop of the frequency curve in the type frequency analysis. There appears to be a notable effect of type frequency on the nature of the token frequency distribution: the greater the average length of the words in the lexicon, the higher the probability of a unimodal distribution. Two principles are required to account for these results—a general dispreference for using long words and a language-particular dispreference for short words in the lexicon.
期刊介绍：
The foci of Glottotheory are: observations and descriptions of all aspects of language and text phenomena including the areas of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics, etc. on all levels of linguistic analysis, applications of methods, models or findings from quantitative linguistics concerning problems of natural language processing, language teaching, documentation and information retrieval, methodological problems of linguistic measurement, model construction, sampling and test theory, epistemological issues such as explanation of language and text phenomena, contributions to theory construction, systems theory, philosophy of science. The journal considers itself as platform for a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative linguistics.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
分享
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
扫码关注我们
