Band 3, Heft 2

The article deals with the peculiarities of the use of various types of attributes in the novels of modern German writers. The paper focuses on the hypothesis concerning the diversification law. The investigation was conducted on the basis of 2775 attributive combinations by the means of the quantitative analysis

This paper proposes a quantitative method, drawn from the field of economic statistics (also known as “econometrics”), to detect the social significance of certain linguistic variables. It uses leastsquare regression analysis to find the relationship between the income of the individuals from a population and several linguistic characteristics of those individuals. As a result, we obtain “hedonic prices”, that indicate whether those characteristics are associated with higher or lower levels of income, and we can also detect whether those prices are statistically significant. The method is illustrated with an example taken from Spanish phonetics

Based on the quantitative method worked out by the author, the initial phoneme combinations (bl, br, fl, gl, and others) in German were investigated. The semantic peculiarities of these combinations were found out. The semantic-phonetic connections may be caused by the iconic nature of the sounds (sound symbolism, sound imitation) or their functional peculiarities in the language

Vulanović’s formula for calculating grammar efficiency is applied to 17 theoretically possible parts-of-speech systems. It is demonstrated that the formula represents grammar efficiency of parts-of-speech systems more adequately than the methods used in the theory of formal languages. Moreover, it is shown that the correlation between parts-of-speech system types and their grammar efficiency can be modeled by the 3-dimensional generalization of the sigmoid

Based on findings in quantitative linguistics for natural network structures a neural network system has been developed recently that can learn and process any coherent language text. It is essentially a technical network depending on a new understanding of information. By using measured text structures it is also a possible model for the unknown organization of neurons for thinking in the brain. In the following, the construction of the language system is outlined, based on natural network structures for word successions that were published some years ago in Glottometrics. Codeless representations of words and sentences through neurons are introduced. After that a hierarchical network system is developed for the abstraction of coherent text from level to level in the system. This leads eventually to a highly compressed representation of one or more sentences through single neurons. These new operations enable the development of novel electronic machines as e.g. perfect machine translators, etc. Last but not least the findings may also point to the possibility of similar operations in the human mind. (For example, up to now the search for codes in human neurons was in vain and therefore there is no idea, how neural networks in the brain are able to produce thoughts)