Abstract
Previous studies of letter redundancy in English texts showed differences which, because of nonsystematic sampling, could be regarded only as error variance. In this study thirty-nine 2528-character samples from English translations of 9 Greek texts were selected to permit controlled analyses of authorship, topic, structure, and time-of-composition factors. Letter redundancy was found to covary with all 4 factors. Authorship and topic differences are of ideographic interest; they may also represent control problems in information-theory-based studies of verbal behavior. The structural analysis showed that prose texts are more redundant than verse texts; this finding has implications for the study of special structural constraints (e.g., telegraph English, aircraft-control English). Translations of the same text from the 14th, 16th, and 20th centuries showed that English letter redundancy is decreasing, as Zipf's “principle of least effort” (1949) would predict.
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