George Kingsley Zipf

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George Kingsley Zipf (1917)

George Kingsley Zipf [ zɪf ] (born January 7, 1902 in Freeport (Illinois) , † September 25, 1950 in Newton (Massachusetts) ) was an American linguist .

Life

Zipf studied at Harvard University and came to Germany (Bonn and Berlin) after graduating in 1925. PhD from Harvard University, then teacher of German; from 1936 Assistant Professor of German ( German studies ) at Harvard University, from 1939 University Lecturer .

His work, in which he investigated the frequency of words in different languages, has become known above all. In the 1930s he developed, among other things, one of Zipf's laws named after him : If you order the words of a language according to their frequency and give the most frequent word rank 1, the second most common word 2, etc., according to Zipf, it is the product always results in approximately the same constant from rank and frequency. This connection has established itself in the literature as the best-known “Zipf's law”. It had to be revised because deviations were found, especially in the very frequent and very rare words. For this and other Zipf's laws see u. a. Crystal (1993: 87) and Prün (1999, 2005). Among the other Zipf's laws there are also findings about the connection between word length and frequency: the more frequent a word is, the shorter it is; also about age and frequency: the more common a word is, the older it is. Prün (1999) shows how the various laws are interrelated and form a preliminary stage of linguistic synergetics .

What is particularly noteworthy about Zipf is that he tried to develop linguistics into a science that is based on the natural sciences. "His method was therefore quantitative, and his explanations would today be called functional-systemic" (Prün & Zipf 2002: 1). One of his central findings is the principle of least effort, which means that people shorten words they use very often in their phonetic substance, while tolerating longer lengths for rare words. Two opposing principles ensure that words demand a reasonable amount of effort from the communication partners: the principle of minimizing the production effort in favor of the speaker or writer and the principle of minimizing the decoding effort in favor of the listener or reader. Both must be in a balanced relationship to each other for communication to be successful.

With his focus on the natural sciences, the development of language laws and attempts to explain the findings, Zipf is considered to be the pioneer of modern quantitative linguistics .

Works

  • Zipf, George Kingsley: Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1932.
  • George Kingsley Zipf: The Psycho-Biology of Language. An Introduction to Dynamic Philology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1935/1965/1968. (With George A. Miller : Introduction , 1965)
  • Zipf, George Kingsley: National unity and disunity . Princeton Press, Bloomington, Ind. 1941.
  • George Kingsley Zipf: Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. An Introduction to Human Ecology. Addison-Wesley Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1949.

(Zipf bibliography see Weblink and Prün & Zipf 2002.)

About Zipf

  • Gabriel Altmann: Zipfian linguistics. In: Glottometrics 3, 2002, 19–26 (PDF full text ).
  • David Crystal: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Translation and editing of the German edition by Stefan Röhrich, Ariane Böckler and Manfred Jansen. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 1993. ISBN 3-593-34824-1
  • George A. Miller: Introduction to Zipf: The Psycho-Biology of Language. An Introduction to Dynamic Philology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1965/1968, p. VX.
  • Claudia Prün: GK Zipf's conception of language as an early prototype of synergetic linguistics. In: Journal of quantitative linguistics 6, 1999, 78-84.
  • Claudia Prün: The work of GK Zipf. In: Reinhard Köhler, Gabriel Altmann, Rajmund G. Piotrowski (eds.): Quantitative Linguistics - Quantitative Linguistics. An international manual . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, pp. 142–152. ISBN 3-11-015578-8
  • Claudia Prün, Robert Zipf: Biographical notes on GK Zipf. In: Glottometrics 3, 2002, 1–10 (PDF full text ). (With work bibliography)
  • Ronald Rousseau: George Kingsley Zipf: life, ideas, his law and informetrics. In: Glottometrics 3, 2002, 11-18 (PDF full text ).

Festschrift

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Zipf, George Kingsley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American linguist
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Freeport (Illinois)
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1950
Place of death Newton (Massachusetts)