Linguistic laws and computer programs

✍ Scribed by Kokol, Peter ;Kokol, Tatjana

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 408 KB
• Volume: 47
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(199610)47:10<781::aid-asi6>3.0.co;2-z

✦ Synopsis

Is it really a "law" of languages encompassing everything from human to monkey to DNA? Or is it just an empirical curiosity, of no more system-theoretic significance than, say, a spurious correlation?.

But the empirical evidence is mounting that when we finally manage to create a theoretical structure within which to speak mathematically about complex systems, power laws like Zipf's will appear as a necessary consequence of such theories. When (and if) they do will be the moment when they pass from interesting empirical curiosities to laws of nature.