The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
Open accessAbstract
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two scaling regimes characterize the word frequency distributions, with only the more common words obeying the classic Zipf law. Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling relation between the corpus size and the vocabulary size of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words, a feature that is likely related to the underlying correlations between words. We calculate the annual growth fluctuations of word use which has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion. This "cooling pattern" forms the basis of a third statistical regularity, which unlike the Zipf and the Heaps law, is dynamical in nature.
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Cites
Power-Law Distributions in Empirical Data
Clauset, A., Shalizi, C. R., & Newman, M. E. J. (2009) · SIAM Review · doi:10.1137/070710111 · Cited by 8,019
Kleiber, M. (1932) · Hilgardia · doi:10.3733/hilg.v06n11p315 · Cited by 2,222
Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language
Cancho, R. F. I., & Solé, R. V. (2003) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0335980100 · Cited by 588
Barabási, A.-L. (2012) · Nature Physics · doi:10.1038/nphys2188 · Cited by 502
Cited by
Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E. (2016) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116 · Cited by 478
Pechenick, E. A., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2015) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0137041 · Cited by 436
Quantifying Wikipedia Usage Patterns Before Stock Market Moves
Moat, H. S., Curme, C., Avakian, A., Kenett, D. Y., Stanley, H. E., & Preis, T. (2013) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/srep01801 · Cited by 317
Self-citationThe advantage of short paper titles
Letchford, A., Moat, H. S., & Preis, T. (2015) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.150266 · Cited by 184
The difficulties of systematic reviews
Westgate, M. J., & Lindenmayer, D. B. (2017) · Conservation Biology · doi:10.1111/cobi.12890 · Cited by 62
Metadata
- Authors
- Petersen, A. M., Tenenbaum, J. N., Havlin, S., Stanley, H. E., & Perc, M.
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2012-12-10
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 943-943
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2010254479
- Cited by
- 190
- References
- 4
- FWCI
- 272.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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- Petersen, A. M., Tenenbaum, J. N., Havlin, S., Stanley, H. E., & Perc, M. (2012). Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00943
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