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Changes in the Coefficients of Zipf’s Law for English Corpora of Different Contexts
Date
2015Type
ThesisDepartment
Mathematics and Statistics
Degree Level
Honors Thesis
Degree Name
Mathematics
Abstract
The statistical behavior of languages has been of great interest to linguists since
the mid-20th century. The frequency distribution of words, often modeled with a
probability mass function called Zipf’s Law (Zipf, 1936, 1949), is a particular target of
research that has undergone increasingly intense scrutiny over the last decade. It turns out
that there is an interesting gap in the research of Zipf’s Law pointed out by Steven
Piantadosi – namely, language is not static and changes from context to context, and there
is comparatively little examination of these fluctuations using Zipf’s Law (2014). This
paper will set out a course for examining how language changes between different
domains of time and different types of written and spoken media via comparing the
parameters of best fit for the data using Zipf’s Law.
Permanent link
http://hdl.handle.net/11714/564Additional Information
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