Paper Info
Title
The challenges of statistical patterns of language: The case of Menzerath's law in genomes
Abstract
AbstractThe importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently, Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in language, music and genomes as a tendency of the mean size of the parts to decrease as the number of parts increases in many situations. This statistical regularity emerges also in the context of genomes, for instance, as a tendency of species with more chromosomes to have a smaller mean chromosome size. It has been argued that the instantiation of this law in genomes is not indicative of any parallel between language and genomes because a the law is inevitable and b noncoding DNA dominates genomes. Here mathematical, statistical, and conceptual challenges of these criticisms are discussed. Two major conclusions are drawn: the law is not inevitable and languages also have a correlate of noncoding DNA. However, the wide range of manifestations of the law in and outside genomes suggests that the striking similarities between noncoding DNA and certain linguistics units could be anecdotal for understanding the recurrence of that statistical law. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2012
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1002/cplx.21429
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
statistical laws,language,genomes,music,non-coding DNA,Menzerath's law
Genome,Zipf's law,Noncoding DNA,Statistical regularity,Biology,Genealogy,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Menzerath's law
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
18
3
1076-2787
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.65
12
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ramon Ferrer-i-cancho121735.25
Núria Forns2305.49
Antoni Hernández-Fernández3357.02
Gemma Bel Enguix45911.38
Jaume Baixeries59912.57