This paper examines data from English, Swedish and German in order to find a theoretical distribution that describes the observed relation between word length and frequency. In Swedish and English, most word tokens consist of three letters only, while shorter or longer words occur less frequently. We found that the equation with the general form f exp ¼ a * L b * c L (a variant of the so-called gamma distribution) approximates the observed frequencies reasonably well. This formula incorporates both the fact that the number of possible words increases with word length, and the fact that longer words tend to be avoided, presumably because they are uneconomic. To our knowledge this formula has not been proposed to describe word frequency data. We examined frequency distributions of word length in Swedish and English, and explored different variants of the equation by systematically varying the a, b and c parameters. Subsequently, we also applied the formula to the frequency distribution of sentence length in English, and found an almost perfect fit for a corpus consisting of different text genres. Moreover, the data showed that the formula can be used to distinguish between different kinds of text genres.

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of VISION, SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews.Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, building, animals and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon and cherry used to describe a wine's qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper.

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