Linguistic complexity: English vs. Polish, text vs. corpus

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.

Approaching the linguistic complexity

We analyze the rank-frequency distributions of words in selected English and Polish texts. We compare scaling properties of these distributions in both languages. We also study a few small corpora of Polish literary texts and find that for a corpus consisting of texts written by different authors the basic scaling 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 scaling regime is broken more strongly than for a comparable corpus of native Polish texts. Moreover, based on the British National Corpus, we consider the rank-frequency distributions of the grammatically basic forms of words (lemmas) tagged with their proper part of speech. We find that these distributions do not scale if each part of speech is analyzed separately. The only part of speech that independently develops a trace of scaling is verbs.