Universal versus system-specific features of punctuation usage patterns in major Western languages

Abstract

The celebrated proverb that “speech is silver, silence is golden” has a long multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts punctuation can be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the virtue of effectively speaking and writing involves – often decisively – the capacity to apply the properly placed breaks. In the present study, based on a large corpus of world-famous and representative literary texts in seven major Western languages, it is shown that the distribution of intervals between consecutive punctuation marks can almost universally be characterized by only two parameters of the discrete Weibull distribution which can be given an intuitive interpretation in terms of the so-called hazard function. The values of these two parameters tend to be language-specific, however, and even appear to navigate translations. The properties of the computed hazard functions indicate that among the studied languages, English appears the least constrained by the necessity to place a consecutive punctuation mark to partition a sequence of words. Spanish reveals a similar tendency. The above characteristics manifest themselves when all consecutive punctuation marks are considered and not the sentence-ending ones only, and this fact is in accordance with the Detrended Fluctuation Analysis of intervals between the corresponding breaks.