Linguistic Complexity: English vs. Polish, Text vs. Corpus
Jarosław Kwapień, Stanisław Drożdż, Adam Orczyk · Acta Physica Polonica A · 2010
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.