Linguistic laws in speech: the case of Catalan and Spanish

  1. González Torre, Ivan 1
  2. Hernández-Fernández, Antoni 2
  3. Garrido, Juan-María 3
  4. Lacasa, Lucas 4
  1. 1 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03n6nwv02

  2. 2 Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
    info

    Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

    Barcelona, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03mb6wj31

  3. 3 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
    info

    Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02msb5n36

  4. 4 Queen Mary University of London
    info

    Queen Mary University of London

    Londres, Reino Unido

    ROR https://ror.org/026zzn846

Editor: Dryad

Year of publication: 2019

Type: Dataset

Abstract

In this work we explore in an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish (Glissando Corpus) four classical linguistic laws (Zipf's law, Herdan's law, Brevity law, and Menzerath-Altmann's law) in oral communication, both in physical units and in symbolic units measured in speech transcriptions, and we also reviewed two more laws recently reformulated: lognormality law and size-rank law. Our results reinforce with empirical evidence in two more languages the 'physical hypothesis' according to which linguistic laws could be explained by physical laws and the principles of information theory. In this sense, linguistic laws would have an oral origin and the evidences recovered in written texts would be a byproduct of the complexity that takes place in speech.