A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System
A natural language (represented by texts generated by native speakers) is considered as a complex system, and the type thereof to which natural languages belong is ascertained. Namely, the authors hypothesize that a language is a self-organized critical system and that the texts of a language are “a...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Wiley
2017-01-01
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| Series: | Complexity |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/9212538 |
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| Summary: | A natural language (represented by texts generated by native speakers) is considered as a complex system, and the type thereof to which natural languages belong is ascertained. Namely, the authors hypothesize that a language is a self-organized critical system and that the texts of a language are “avalanches” flowing down its word cooccurrence graph. The respective statistical characteristics for distributions of the number of words in the texts of English and Russian languages are calculated; the samples were constructed on the basis of corpora of literary texts and of a set of social media messages (as a substitution to the oral speech). The analysis found that the number of words in the texts obeys power-law distribution. |
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| ISSN: | 1076-2787 1099-0526 |