This contribution examines the macro quantitative features of 15 lowfrequency word classes. The relationship between word frequency classes and the sizes of the frequency classes obeys Altmann’s power law, and the sizes of lowfrequency word classes increase along with the increase of text length. The relationship between text length and the sizes of low-frequency word classes also obeys Altmann...

We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long Chinese texts (or for mixtures of short Chinese texts), rank-frequency relations for Chinese characters display a two-layer, hierarchic structure that combines a Z...

The aim of this study is to stimulate interest in searching the Electronic Archive of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Works and the web site dedicated to this important Italian author in order to receive and implement suggestions, and to create new lexical resources for students, translators and readers. The article starts with a brief description of the editorial features of this Archive, that runs under...

We compare the social character networks of biographical, legendary and fictional texts, in search of statistical marks of historical information. We examine the frequency of character appearance and find a Zipf Law that does not depend on the literary genera and historical content. We also examine global and local complex networks indexes, in particular, correlation plots between the recently ...

Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that has served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that Zipf's law-together with its applicability for a single text and its generalizations to high and low frequencies including hapax legomena-can be derived from assuming that the words are drawn into the text with random p...

This essay serves as an attempt to examine various hapax legomena in the Old English poem Exodus from an etymological perspective in order to more conclusively determine its date of composition. Exodus is somewhat unique among Old English epic poems in its proportion ofhapax legeomena, having over 150 examples in under 600 surviving lines. Its date of composition is ofparticular scholarly inter...

The Luigi Cattaneo Museum of anatomical waxes, part of the University of Bologna, among its most interesting teratological specimens, exhibits a peculiar model named ‘Opoectodimo’ (literally opoectodymus in English or Latin), showing a particular case of conjoined twins. As shown by the wax model (Figure 1) as well as by the correspondent natural skeleton, the two bodies are fused at the cephal...

How do native speakers interpret new words when they read or hear them? How much help and what kind of help are they given by the immediate context in which the new word occurs? These are questions which we set out to investigate on the basis of a large corpus of newspaper English. We were working within the framework of the APRIL project, which is a three year, EPSRC-funded research project ai...