A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System. (19th November 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gromov, Vasilii A.; Migrina, Anastasia M.
• Other Names: Olivar Gerard Academic Editor.
• Is Part Of: Complexity. Volume 2017(2017)
• Publication Date: 2017-11-19
• Subjects: Chaotic behavior in systems -- Periodicals; Complexity (Philosophy) -- Periodicals; 003
• DOI: 10.1155/2017/9212538
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1076-2787

Abstract

Abstract : A natural language (represented by texts generated by native speakers) is considered as a complex system, and the type thereof to which natural languages belong is ascertained. Namely, the authors hypothesize that a language is a self-organized critical system and that the texts of a language are "avalanches" flowing down its word cooccurrence graph. The respective statistical characteristics for distributions of the number of words in the texts of English and Russian languages are calculated; the samples were constructed on the basis of corpora of literary texts and of a set of social media messages (as a substitution to the oral speech). The analysis found that the number of words in the texts obeys power-law distribution.