Text block law

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The text block Act (also Frumkina Act , Act Zwirner, Zwirner & Frumkina ) is one of the language laws , the Quantitative Linguistics suggests. It controls the frequency with which certain linguistic units appear in text blocks. Text blocks are obtained by dividing a text into many equally long sections. If one then examines in how many text blocks a certain linguistic unit does not appear once, once, twice and so on, then one obtains distributions that can be theoretically justified and empirically verified.

Units that follow the text block law

Very different linguistic units such as sounds , words and syntactic constructions follow the text block law. Depending on the type of unit examined, the text blocks can be formed differently. For the investigation of sounds, text blocks of 50 or 100 sounds (or even larger) are suitable, for words text blocks with a length of 50 or 100 words, and so on. With this approach, a number of different linguistic units were successfully processed. It was thus possible to show that the conjunction “and” and four other words (“not”, “he”, “I” and “Franz”) appear in Otto Jägersberg's story Belonging to correspond to the negative hypergeometric distribution. As an example, the distribution serving the conjunction "and" in the text blocks of the story Belonging :

x
n (x)
NP (x)
0
3
2.42
1
7th
8.63
2
14th
15.74
3
25th
19.05
4th
16
16.66
5
9
10.74
6th
3
4.97
7th
1
1.51
8th
2
0.28

(Where x: number of occurrences of the conjunction "and", n (x) the number of text blocks observed in this text with x occurrences of "and"; NP (x) the number of text blocks with x occurrences of "and", which is calculated when the negative hypergeometric distribution is fitted to the observed data.Result: the negative hypergeometric distribution is a good model for this text with the test criterion P = 0.34, where P is considered good if it is greater than or equal to 0.05 For more detailed explanations, please refer to the literature given.)

Discovery of the text block law

The idea of ​​examining the frequency of linguistic units in text blocks seems to have been developed for the first time in the 1930s by Zwirner & Zwirner (1935, 1938) on the basis of sounds. It was later rediscovered on the basis of words by Frumkina (1962), probably without knowledge of the earlier work. It is therefore also known in linguistics as the Frumkina law and occasionally as the Zwirner, Zwirner & Frumkina law , and has proven itself in a number of reviews.

literature

  • Gabriel Altmann : Repetitions in Texts. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1988. ISBN 3-88339-663-X .
  • Gabriel Altmann, V. Burdinski: Towards a Law of Word Repetitions in Text Blocks . In: Werner Lehfeldt, Udo Strauss (eds.): Glottometrika 4. Brockmeier, Bochum 1982, pages 147-167. ISBN 3-88339-250-2 .
  • Karl-Heinz Best : Linguistic units in text blocks . In: Glottometrics 9, 2005, pages 1-12. (PDF full text ).
  • Karl-Heinz Best: Quantitative Linguistics. An approximation . 3rd, heavily revised. u. Supplemented edition Peust & Gutschmidt, Göttingen 2006. ISBN 3-933043-17-4 .
  • Karl-Heinz Best: Quantitative studies on Low German and Dutch. In: Göttinger Contributions to Linguistics 13, 2006, pp. 51–71. (The article contains an example from Low German for the text block law on page 60f.)
  • Günther Billmeier: About the significance of selection texts . Investigation on the basis of newspaper texts . In: Hugo Moser u. a. (Ed.): Research reports of the Institute for German Language 2, 1968, pages 126–171.
  • Barron Brainerd: Article use as an indicator of style among English-language authors . In: Siegfried Jäger (Ed.), Linguistics and Statistics. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1972, pages 11-32. ISBN 3-5280-3705-9 .
  • RM Frumkina: O zakonach raspredelenija slov i klassov slov . In: TT Mološnaja (ed.): Strukturno-tipologičeskie issledovanija . AN SSSR, Moskva 1962, pp. 124-133.
  • Reinhard Köhler : The distribution of some syntactic construction types in text blocks . In: Ludmila Uhlířova, Gejza Wimmer, Gabriel Altmann, Reinhard Köhler (Eds.): Text as a linguistic paradigm: levels, constituents, constructs. Festschrift in honor of Luděk Hřebíček . Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 2001, pages 136-148. ISBN 3-88476-398-9 .
  • Alexander Mehler: Properties of the textual units and systems. In: Reinhard Köhler, Gabriel Altmann, Gabriel, Rajmund G. Piotrowski (eds.): Quantitative Linguistics - Quantitative Linguistics. An international manual . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, pages 325–348; Repetitions in text blocks: Page 338. ISBN 3-11-015578-8 .
  • Eberhard Zwirner , Kennosuke Ezawa (eds.): Phonometrie, first-third part. Karger, Basel / New York 1966, 1968, 1969.
  • Eberhard Zwirner, Kurt Zwirner: Sound frequency and random law . In: Research and Progress 11, No. 4, 1935, pp. 43-45. (Also in: Zwirner & Ezawa (Eds.), Part Three: 55–59.)
  • Eberhard Zwirner, Kurt Zwirner: Sound frequency and language comparison . In: monthly for higher schools 37, 1938, pages 246-253. (Also in: Zwirner & Ezawa (Eds.), Part Three, Pages 68–74.)

Web links

Wiktionary: Text block  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://lql.uni-trier.de/index.php/Text-blocks
  2. ↑ The story is contained in: Otto Jägersberg: The last bite. Diogenes, Zurich 1977, pp. 113-164. The investigation of the 5 words is given in Best 2006, pp. 99-102.
  3. ↑ http://www.glottopedia.de/index.php/Frumkina-Gesetz
  4. ↑ Best 2006, pp. 99-103.