Quantitative analysis of syllable properties in Croatian, Serbian, Russian, and Ukrainian
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Biljana Rujević
Abstract
Ten chapters from a Russian novel and its translations into Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian are automatically syllabified following the same approach in all four languages. Syllable frequencies and syllable length are modelled by probability distributions which are commonly used for frequency and length of words (the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution and the Dacey-Poisson distribution, respectively). We show that Zipf’s law of brevity, according to which the more frequent words tend to be shorter, can be extended to syllables. We suggest a generalization of the Menzerath-Altmann law, a relation between word length and the mean syllable length. The generalized version of the law is valid for both word types and word tokens.
Abstract
Ten chapters from a Russian novel and its translations into Croatian, Serbian, and Ukrainian are automatically syllabified following the same approach in all four languages. Syllable frequencies and syllable length are modelled by probability distributions which are commonly used for frequency and length of words (the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution and the Dacey-Poisson distribution, respectively). We show that Zipf’s law of brevity, according to which the more frequent words tend to be shorter, can be extended to syllables. We suggest a generalization of the Menzerath-Altmann law, a relation between word length and the mean syllable length. The generalized version of the law is valid for both word types and word tokens.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Part I. Theory and models 7
- On the impact of the initial phrase length on the position of enclitics in Old Czech 9
- Term distance, frequency and collocations 21
- A method for the comparison of general sequences via type-token ratio 37
- Quantitative analysis of syllable properties in Croatian, Serbian, Russian, and Ukrainian 55
- N -grams of grammatical functions and their significant order in the Japanese clause 69
- Linking the dependents 93
- Grammar efficiency and the One-Meaning–One-Form Principle 109
- Distribution and characteristics of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese 121
- Part II. Empirical studies 135
- The perils of big data 137
- From distinguishability to informativity 145
- A Modern Greek readability tool 163
- Phonological properties as predictors of text success 177
- Calculating the victory chances 195
- Topological mapping for visualisation of high-dimensional historical linguistic data 209
- Book genre and author’s gender recognition based on titles 225
- Quantitative analysis of bibliographic corpora 239
- Analysis of English text genre classification based on dependency types 257
- In memory of Gabriel Altmann 271
- Index 277
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Part I. Theory and models 7
- On the impact of the initial phrase length on the position of enclitics in Old Czech 9
- Term distance, frequency and collocations 21
- A method for the comparison of general sequences via type-token ratio 37
- Quantitative analysis of syllable properties in Croatian, Serbian, Russian, and Ukrainian 55
- N -grams of grammatical functions and their significant order in the Japanese clause 69
- Linking the dependents 93
- Grammar efficiency and the One-Meaning–One-Form Principle 109
- Distribution and characteristics of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese 121
- Part II. Empirical studies 135
- The perils of big data 137
- From distinguishability to informativity 145
- A Modern Greek readability tool 163
- Phonological properties as predictors of text success 177
- Calculating the victory chances 195
- Topological mapping for visualisation of high-dimensional historical linguistic data 209
- Book genre and author’s gender recognition based on titles 225
- Quantitative analysis of bibliographic corpora 239
- Analysis of English text genre classification based on dependency types 257
- In memory of Gabriel Altmann 271
- Index 277
