#3983. A Zipfian Approach to Words in Contexts: The Cases of Modern English and Chinese

September 2026publication date
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Journal’s subject area:
Language and Linguistics;
Linguistics and Language;
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Abstract:
The system-level complexity of language has been thoroughly investigated in terms of Zipf’s law, whose quantitative features have proved to reflect text and language typology. This study extends the scope of Zipf’s law from the macroscopic scale of language to specific words in contexts, with the aim of examining its potential as an indicator of word typology. The focus is confined to the high-frequency words in English and Chinese. It has been found that the log–log rank-frequency distributions of contextual words of the words in question generally abide by the linear function y = ax+b. The contextual information as reflected by this Zipf-based index might be more important to the emergence of word classes of Chinese, which has no real inflection as a word-class indicator. From a Zipfian approach, the findings have preliminarily approved Saussure’s systems thinking regarding linguistic signs.
Keywords:
Zipf’s law; linguistic signs; language typology; language; contextual words

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