Abstract
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its frequency rank, and the meaning-frequency law, relating the frequency of a word with its number of meanings. Although these laws were formulated more than half a century ago, they have been only investigated in a few languages. Here we present the first study of these laws in Catalan. We verify these laws in Catalan via the relationship among their exponents and that of the rank-frequency law. We present a new protocol for the analysis of these Zipfian laws that can be extended to other languages. We report the first evidence of two marked regimes for these laws in written language and speech, paralleling the two regimes in Zipf's rank-frequency law in large multi-author corpora discovered in early 2000s. Finally, the implications of these two regimes will be discussed.
Highlights
During the 1st half of the last century, G
This implies that a trendy word at present () such as coronavirus does not appear in Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana (CTILC) corpus and, there are words that have fallen into disuse from the 19th century such as coquessa
Γ approaches 0.5 in CTILC as the bin size increases and the difference between δ and δ0, is slightly reduced when binning is used in both corpora
Summary
During the 1st half of the last century, G. K. Zipf carried out a vast investigation of statistical regularities of languages [1,2,3], that lead to the formulation of linguistic laws [4]. A subset has received very little attention: laws that relate the frequency of a word with its number of meanings in two ways. The law of meaning distribution, that relates the frequency rank of a word with its number of meanings The meaning-frequency law, that relates the frequency of words to their number of meanings
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