Length-frequency statistics for written English

Extracting Syntax Statistics from Large Corpora of Written English

The field of linguistics has seen a growing interest in the statistics of everyday language. In studying how we acquire language and why some of its aspects are more difficult for us than others, it is critical to understand the linguistic environment to which we are exposed. However, gathering statistics over syntactic structures, even with a syntactically tagged corpus, can be difficult and t...

Minimization of dependency length in written English q

Gibson’s Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76; Gibson, E. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O’Neil (Eds.), Image, Language, Brain (pp. 95–126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] proposes that the processing complexity of a ...

Gender Statistics from English

The predictability of letters in written english

We show that the predictability of letters in written English texts depends strongly on their position in the word. The first letters are usually the least easy to predict. This agrees with the intuitive notion that words are well defined subunits in written languages, with much weaker correlations across these units than within them. It implies that the average entropy of a letter deep inside ...

The nature of affixing in written English

Any algorithmic study of written English must sooner or later face the problem of unscrambling English affixes. The role of affixes is crucial in the study of word-breaking practice. In the automatic determination of the parts of speech (a central feature of automatic syntactic analysis), the suppressing action of affixes must be understood in detail. In the determination of English citation fo...