Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts

Abstract

A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: Alice in wonderland and Through a looking glass. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log-log plots of the sentence length-rank relationship are presented for the major punctuation marks. Different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents. The exponent can take a value much less than unity (ca. 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. The texts are also mapped into time series based on the word frequencies. The quantitative differences between the original and translated texts are very minutes, at the exponent level. It is argued that sentences seem to be more reliable than word distributions in discussing an author style.

Words ranking and Hirsch index for identifying the core of the hapaxes in political texts

“…For an excellent review of the empirical settings where power laws is a valid device for representing related phenomena and some theoretical explanations of such a way to fit data, we refer to [54]. In agreement with other linguistic studies [49,61,1,2,8,65], we have tested the validity of the Zipf-Mandelbrot law in properly fitting the data by implementing a best-fit optimization procedure [79,80,43]. In this preliminary phase, we have found statistical compliance of the considered dataset with Zipf-Mandelbrot law, even in presence of (quite) negligible deviations at low ranks (see the fourth step below for a comment on this).…”

“…The queen and harem effect appears because the set of such identically pronounceable words used as hapaxes has a particularly large cardinality. In noting this, we provide further 2 Which is the respective of king and vice-roys but manifested at the highest ranks 16 confirmations that the US Presidents use words as devices for communication strategies, having a clear idea on the proper terminologies -always the same -to be used only once in specific situations. This goes in the direction of stating a substantial tendency of the politicians to imitate the past when delivering a talk, as already discussed in the paper.…”

“…The analysis of how such speeches should be received has been already a little bit discussed in [2,4,76]. In this context, it would be interesting to use readability tests, readability formulas, or readability metrics for evaluating the readability of President speeches; this should be (usually made) by observing punctuation, and counting syllables, words, and sentences.…”

Robustness of sentence length measures in written texts

“…In general, sentence lengths have been quantified by the number of words [24,29,25,28] or characters [30,31,26,27]. Also, note that the recurrence time of full stops also quantifies the sentence length [3].…”

A Universal Rank-Size Law

“…in complex systems [4] and phenomena, like in fluid mechanics [5,6] mimicking agent diffusion. In several studies, researchers have detected the validity of power laws, for a number of characteristic quantities of complex systems [7,8,9,10,11]. Such studies, at the frontier of a wide set of scientific contexts, are sometimes tied to several issues of technical nature or rely only on the exploration of distribution functions.…”