Contents of Glottometrics 3, 2002 (including abstracts)

To Honor G. K. Zipf

 

Foreword
Prün, Claudia, Zipf, Robert
Biographical notes on G.K. Zipf                                                                           1-10
Harvard philologist George Kingsley Zipf has been underestimated by mainstream linguistics for the past half century. After short consideration of the significance of Zipf’s work, this paper presents a personal account of Zipf’s family background, carreer and private life by one of his sons. An extensive Bibliography is added.
Rousseau, Ronald
George Kingsley Zipf: life, ideas, his law and informetrics 11-18
In this article we present a short biography of the linguist George Kingsley Zipf.  We recall his work on the frequency of words in Chinese language and briefly discuss Zipf’s principle of least effort. We mention his influence in the field of informetrics and end this contribution by highlighting some recent applications of Zipf's law in Internet research, geography and economics.
Altmann, Gabriel
Zipfian linguistics          19-26
Zipf´s ideas are the foundation stones of modern quantitative linguistics. Many of them have been developed both mathematically and in content, but his work seems to be inexhaustible. His influence is not restricted to linguistics but incessantly penetrates other sciences.
Hřebíček, Luděk
Zipf´s law and text 27-38
Two questions are to be solved: (1) Which is the sense of the immense corpuses? Are they necessary for the deeper investigation of the rank-size relation? The idea of text (instead of the predominating idea of sentence and the lower units) as a new linguistic paradigm cannot exterminate the importance of the Zipf law. (2) Certainly, rank can be immediately derived from size. However, seeking the linguistic reasons of ranks could be set against the possible objection of tautology in connection with the Zipf law.
Uhlířová, Ludmila
Zipf´s notion of „economy“ on the text level 39-60
The role of nominal phrases with the determiner ‘this’ in text structure is examined and interpreted in terms of Zipf´s opposition of the Force of Unification and the Force of Diversification. Their balance is demonstrated on Czech data.
Gumenjuk, A., Kostyshin, A., Simonova, S.
An approach to the analysis of text structure 61-89
The present article presents an approach to the study of specific arrangements of com-ponents in a separate linguistic or musical text. Concept and definition of the element order in the text are given and related formal models are described. The formulas for the calculation of integral numerical characteristics of element orders in texts, which take into account not only the structure but also the positional arrangement of the text components, are provided for the detailed description of a text. The distribution of numerical characteristics of element orders in a text is presented; so are the samples of research done on the construction of poems and pieces of music.
Andersen, Simone
Speakers´s information content: length-frequency correlation as partial correlation 90-109

A new variable is presented which is demonstrated to be of influence on the correlation between lengths and frequencies of words occurring in texts. The variable is called speaker’s information content (“sic“).
Majerník, Vladimir
A conceptualization of the configurational and functional organization 110-135
Configurational and functional organizations are distinguished and analyzed. Information theoretical measures are proposed and examples of organization form physics, biogenesis, music and language are presented.
Best, Karl-Heinz
The distribution of rhythmic units in German short prose 136-142
The study of length of rhythmic units was initiated by K. Marbe (1904). In the present article we try to embed the problem in the general theory of length of linguistic units. It is shown that in modern German prose the length of rhythmic units abides by the Hyperpoisson distribution.
Adamic, Lada, A., Huberman, Bernardo
Zipf´s law and the Internet 143-150
Zipf's law governs many features of the Internet. Observations of Zipf distributions, while interesting in and of themselves, have strong implications for the design and function of the Internet. The connectivity of Internet routers influences the robustness of the network while the distribution in the number of email contacts affects the spread of email viruses. Even web caching strategies are formulated to account for a Zipf distribution in the number of requests for webpages.

Glottometrics ist eine unregelmäßig erscheinende Zeitschrift für die quantitative Erforschung von Sprache und Text.

 

 Glottometrics is a scientific journal for the quantitative research on language and text published at irregular intervals

Beiträge in Deutsch oder Englisch sollten an einen der Herausgeber in einem gängigen Textverarbeitssystem (vorrangig WORD) geschickt werden.

 

 Contributions in English or German written with a common text processing system (preferably WORD) should be sent to one of the editors
Glottometrics kann aus dem Internet heruntergeladen, auf CD-ROM (PDF-Format) oder in Buchform bestellt werden. Glottometrics can be downloaded from the Internet, obtained on CD-ROM (in PDF) or in form of printed copies

Herausgeber/Editors:

G. Altmann 02351973070-0001@t-online.de
K.-H. Best kbest@gwdg.de
A. Hardie a.hardie@lancester.ac.uk 
L. Hrebicek hrebicek@orient.cas.cz
R. Köhler koehler@uni-trier.de
V. Kromer kromer@newmail.ru 
O. Rottmann otto.rottmann@t-online.de
A. Schulz reuter.schulz@t-online.de 
G. Wimmer wimmer@mat.savba.sk
A. Ziegler arneziegler@compuserve.de

Herunterladen/ Downloading: http://www.ram-verlag.de

ISSN 1617-8351                                                                                         back