Title
Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish
Abstract
In this work we consider Glissando Corpus-an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish-and empirically analyze the presence of the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf's law, Herdan's law, Brevity law, and Menzerath-Altmann's law) in oral communication, and further complement this with the analysis of two recently formulated laws: lognormality law and size-rank law. By aligning the acoustic signal of speech production with the speech transcriptions, we are able to measure and compare the agreement of each of these laws when measured in both physical and symbolic units. Our results show that these six laws are recovered in both languages but considerably more emphatically so when these are examined in physical units, hence reinforcing the so-called 'physical hypothesis' according to which linguistic laws might indeed have a physical origin and the patterns recovered in written texts would, therefore, be just a byproduct of the regularities already present in the acoustic signals of oral communication.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.3390/e21121153
ENTROPY
Keywords
Field
DocType
Zipf's law,Brevity law,Menzerath-Altmann's law,Herdan's law,lognormal distribution,size-rank law,quantitative linguistics,Glissando corpus,scaling,speech
Transcription (linguistics),Catalan,Zipf's law,Glissando,Law,Speech production,Linguistics,Mathematics,Quantitative linguistics
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
21
12
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Antoni Hernández-Fernández1357.02
Iván G. Torre200.34
Juan-María Garrido300.34
Lucas Lacasa4166.12