3.566 Zipf's Law: references (119)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Wed, 11 Oct 89 18:00:55 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 566. Wednesday, 11 Oct 1989.

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 89 13:26:46 CDT
From: Steven J. DeRose <D106GFS@UTARLVM1>
Subject: Zipf's Law references (~100 lines)

In reply to Robert Philip Weber's inquiry re. Zipf's Law:

There is some current literature on this for English and other lgs.
For example:

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Burton, N. G. and J. C. R. Licklider. 1955. "Long-Range
Constraints in the Statistical Structure of Printed English."
American Journal of Psychology (68): 650-653.

Card, William and Virginia McDavid. 1966. "English Words of
Very High Frequency." College English (27): 596-604.

Carroll, John B. 1967. "On Sampling from a Lognormal Model
of Word-Frequency Distribution." In Kucera and Francis
(1967): 406-413.

Carroll, J. B., P. Davies, and B. Richman (eds.). 1971. The
American Heritage Word-Frequency Book. New York: American
Heritage Publishing Co./ Boston: Houghton - Mifflin.

Church, Kenneth W. 1988. "A Stochastic Parts Program and
Noun Phrase Parser for Unrestricted Text." Proceedings of
the Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing.
Association for Computational Linguistics: 136-143.

Condon, E. V. 1928. "Statistics of vocabulary." Science
(67): 300.

Cover, Thomas M. and Roger C. King. 1978. "A Convergent
Gambling Estimate of the Entropy of English." IEEE
Transactions on Information Theory (IT-24, 4): 413-421.

Damerau, Frederick J. 1971. Markov Models and Linguistic
Theory: An Experimental Study of a Model for English. Janua
Liguarum Series Minor, vol. 95. The Hague: Mouton.

Dewey, G. 1923. Relative Frequency of English Speech
Sounds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Cited in Condon (1928).

Jakobson, Roman (ed.). 1961a. The Structure of Language and
its Mathematical Aspects. Proceedings of Symposia in Applied
Mathematics, vol. 12. Providence, Rhode Island: American
Mathematical Society.

Jakobson, Roman. 1961b. "Linguistics and Communication
Theory." In Jakobson (1961a): 245-252.

Kucera, Henry and W. Nelson Francis. 1967. Computational
Analysis of Present-day American English. Providence, Rhode
Island: Brown University Press.

Mandelbrot, B. 1961. "On the Theory of Word Frequencies and
on Related Markovian Models of Discourse." In Jakobson
(1961a): 190-219.

Miller, George A. and Noam Chomsky. 1963. "Finitary Models
of Language Users." In R. Duncan Lee, Robert A. Bush, and
Eugene Galanter (eds.), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology,
vol. 2: 420-491. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Miller, George A. and Edwin B. Newman. 1958. "Tests of a
Statistical Explanation of the Rank-Frequency Relation for
Word in Written English." American Journal of Psychology
(71): 209-258.

Miller, George A., E. B. Newman, and E. A. Friedman. 1958.
"Length-Frequency Statistics for Written English."
Information and Control (1): 370-389.

Shannon, Claude E. 1948a. "A Mathematical Theory of
Communication." Part I. Bell System Technical Journal (27):
379-423. Reprinted in Slepian (1974): 5-18.

________. 1948b. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication."
Part II. Bell System Technical Journal (27): 623-656.
Reprinted in Slepian (1974): 19-29.

________. 1951. "Prediction and Entropy of Printed
English." Bell System Technical Journal (30): 50-64.

Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. The Psycho-Biology of
Language. 2d ed. Reprinted 1965, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press.

________. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least
Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. 2d ed. Reprinted
1965, New York: Hafner Publishing Company.

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I discussed Zipfian relations in my dissertation; the bibliography
there lists more sources, and the text explores the application
of Zipfian models to certain lexical phenomena other than
word frequency, such as parts of speech, collocations, etc.

The diss is:
DeRose, Steven J. 1989. "Stochastic Methods for Resolution
of Grammatical Category Ambiguity in Inflected and
Uninflected Language." Doctoral dissertation. Providence,
RI: Brown University, Department of Cognitive and Linguistic
Sciences.

SJD