Academic Summary

In the research paper “Word length, sentence length and frequency” Bengt Sigurd, Mats Eeg-Olofsson and Joost van de Weijer pursue the topic of frequency of words and sentences. They state that shorter words are more frequent because of economic factors.

Firstly, they consider ideas about the economy of language are very suggestive and they are confirmed by the data in the paper. Secondly, they suggested some formulas that approximate the observed frequencies and proves that longer words tend to be avoided. Besides this, they found out that according to the English and Sweden corpuses three-letter syllables are the most frequent.

Ultimately, what authors are trying to convey trough their research paper is it shows that the frequencies of language units seem to be a compromise between the desire to have many alternatives of expression and the desire to minimize the effort of producing and interpreting them.

Comments

  1. Gr: they consider ideas about the economy of THE language are very suggestive and they are confirmed:

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for your feedback. I believe it was a slip, but nevertheless I got it.

    ReplyDelete

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