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Lotka phenomenon in the words’ syntactic distribution complexity

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Abstract

To better understand the distribution of words in all kinds of syntactic structures, the paper calculates the word distribution in syntactic structures of both English and Chinese. On the basis of the calculation, the article presents the definition of the words’ syntactic distribution complexity. After arranging the Chinese and English words according to their own syntactic distribution complexity, respectively, the Lotka phenomenon can be clearly attested by the results. The discovery made in the paper reveals the law of the words’ syntactic distribution in linguistic studies on one hand and the statistically proven fact that Chinese words’ syntax is much more complex than that of the English after comparing the Lotka phenomenon of both Chinese and English words’ syntactic distribution complexity on the other hand.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by a grant from the Research of Knowledge Mining Technology and application Based on Intelligent Information Process (Grant No. 08JJD870225) which is supported by the Foundation from Ministry of Education of China and the research of Automatic Acquisition of English–Chinese Parallel Pairs from Websites (Grant No. 2010CW02) which is Supported by the Scientific Research Foundation of Graduate School of Nanjing University. We would like to thank Dr Bin Li of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Nanjing University, Professor Xiaohe Chen of the Department of Language Technology of Nanjing Normal University and Professor Boran Zhang and Xiangqing Wei of Center for Bilingual Dictionary Research of Nanjing University, for their data, academic insight and valuable comments.

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Correspondence to Dongbo Wang.

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Wang, D., Zhu, D. & Su, X. Lotka phenomenon in the words’ syntactic distribution complexity. Scientometrics 90, 483–498 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0546-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0546-z

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