10.6071/M3XW9T
González Torre, Ivan
0000-0003-2380-010X
Technical University of Madrid
Hernández-Fernández, Antoni
0000-0002-9466-2704
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Garrido, Juan-María
National University of Distance Education
Lacasa, Lucas
Queen Mary University of London
Linguistic laws in speech: the case of Catalan and Spanish
Dryad
dataset
2019
2019-11-11T00:00:00Z
2019-11-11T00:00:00Z
en
75867793 bytes
2
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
In this work we explore in an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish
(Glissando Corpus) four classical linguistic laws (Zipf's law,
Herdan's law, Brevity law, and Menzerath-Altmann's law) in oral
communication, both in physical units and in symbolic units measured in
speech transcriptions, and we also reviewed two more laws recently
reformulated: lognormality law and size-rank law. Our results reinforce
with empirical evidence in two more languages the 'physical
hypothesis' according to which linguistic laws could be explained by
physical laws and the principles of information theory. In this sense,
linguistic laws would have an oral origin and the evidences recovered in
written texts would be a byproduct of the complexity that takes place in
speech.