Contributions to the Science of Text And Language: Word Length Studies And Related Issues

by Grzybek, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781402040672
• ISBN10: 1402040679
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-15
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

This volume contains a collection of contributions to the science of language, focusing on the study of word length in particular. Within a synergetic framework, the word turns out to be a central linguistic unit, as is clearly outlined in the Editor's preface. The book's first chapter is an extensive introduction to the history and state of the art of word length studies.The studies included unify contributions from three important linguistic fields, namely, linguistics and text analysis, mathematics and statistics, and corpus and data base design, which together give a comprehensive approach to the quantitative study of text and language and word length studies. The broad spectrum of word length studies covered within this volume will be of interest to experts working in the fields of general linguistics, text scholarship and related fields, and, understanding language as one example of complex semiotic systems, the volume should be of interest for scholars from other fields as well.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
1 Introductory Remarks: On the Science of Language in Light of the Language of Science	1	(14)
Peter Grzybek
2 History and Methodology of Word Length Studies	15	(76)
Peter Grzybek
3 Information Content of Words in Texts	91	(26)
Simone Andersen, Gabriel Altmann
4 Zero-Syllable Words in Determining Word Length	117	(40)
Gordana Antic, Emmerich Kelih, Peter Grzybek
5 Within-Sentence Distribution and Retention of Content Words and Function Words	157	(14)
August Fenk, Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon
6 On Text Corpora, Word Lengths, and Word Frequencies in Slovenian	171	(16)
Primož Jakopin
7 Text Corpus as an Abstract Data Structure	187	(12)
Reinhard Köhler
8 About Word Length Distribution	199	(12)
Victor V. Kromer
9 The Fall of the Jers in the Light of Menzerath's Law	211	(4)
Werner Lehfeldt
10 Towards the Foundations of Menzerath's Law	215	(26)
Anatolij A. Polikarpov
11 Aspects of the Typology of Slavic Languages	241	(18)
Otto A. Rottmann
12 Multivariate Statistical Methods in Quantitative Text Analyses	259	(18)
Ernst Stadlober, Mario Djuzelic
13 Word Length and Word Frequency	277	(18)
Udo Strauss, Peter Grzybek, Gabriel Altmann
14 Developing the Croatian National Corpus and Beyond	295	(6)
Marko Tadic
15 About Word Length Counting in Serbian	301	(18)
Duško Vitas, Gordana Pavlovic-Lažetic, Cvetana Krstev
16 Word-Length Distribution in Present-Day Lower Sorbian Newspaper Texts	319	(10)
Andrew Wilson
17 Towards a Unified Derivation of Some Linguistic Laws	329	(10)
Gejza Wimmer; Gabriel Altmann
Contributing Authors	339	(4)
Author Index	343	(4)
Subject Index	347