The challenges of statistical patterns of language: The case of Menzerath's law in genomes

Complexity

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 11-17

  Ferrer I Cancho, Ramon ^a   Forns, Núria ^b   Hernández Fernández, Antoni ^a,b   Bel Enguix, Gemma ^c   Baixeries, Jaume ^a  

^a UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE CATALUNYA   (Spain)

^b UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA   (Spain)

^c AIX MARSEILLE UNIVERSITY   (France)

Author keywords

Genomes; Language; Menzerath's law; Music; Non coding DNA; Statistical laws

Indexed keywords

EID: 84872486566     PISSN: 10762787     EISSN: 10990526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/cplx.21429     Document Type: Note

References (38)

1. Miller, G. A. Some effects of intermittent silence. Am J Psychol 1957, 10, 311-314.
2. Miller, G. A.; Chomsky, N. Finitary models of language users. In: Handbook of Mathematical Psychology II; Luce, R.;Bush, R.;Galanter, E., Eds.; Wiley: New York, 1963; pp 419-491.
3. Miller, G. A. Introduction. In: The Psycho-biology of Language; Zipf, G. K. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1963; pp v-x.
4. Zipf, G. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort; Addison-Wesley: Cambridge, MA, 1949.
5. Li, W. Random texts exhibit Zipf's-law-like word frequency distribution. IEEE Trans Inf Theory 1992, 38, 1842-1845.
6. Suzuki, R.; Buck, J. R.; Tyack, P. L. The use of Zipf's law in animal communication analysis. Anim Behav 2005, 69, F9-F17.
7. Li, W. Zipf's law and the structure and evolution of languages, A.A. Tsonis, C. Schultz, and P.A. Tsonis, Complexity 1997, 2, 12-13 (Letter to the Editor). Complexity 1998, 3, 9-10.
8. Ferrer-i-Cancho R, Elvevåg B. Random texts do not exhibit the real Zipf's law-like rank distribution. PLoS ONE 2010, 5, e9411.
9. Baixeries, J.; Hernández-Fernández, A.; Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Random models of Menzerath-Altmann law in genomes. Biosystems 2012, 107, 167-173.
10. Ferrer-i-Cancho, R.; Gavaldà, R. The frequency spectrum of finite samples from the intermittent silence process. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 2009, 60, 837-843.
11. Solé, R. V. Genome size, self-organization and DNA's dark matter. Complexity 2010, 16, 20-23.
12. Menzerath, P. Die Architektonik des deutschen Wortschatzes. Dümmler: Bonn, 1954.
13. Boroda, M. G.; Altmann, G. Menzerath's law in musical texts. Musikometrica 1991, 3, 1-13.
14. Wilde, J.; Schwibbe, M. H. Organizationsformen von Erbinformation Im Hinblick auf die Menzerathsche Regel. In: Das Menzerathsche Gesetz in informationsverarbeitenden Systemen; Altmann, G.;Schwibbe, M. H., Eds.; Olms: Hildesheim, 1989; pp 92-107.
15. Ferrer-i-Cancho, R.; Forns, N. The self-organization of genomes. Complexity 2010, 15, 34-36.
16. Li, W. Menzerath's law at the gene-exon level in the human genome. Complexity 2012, 17, 49-53.
17. Altmann, G. Prolegomena to Menzerath's law. Glottometrika 1980, 2, 1-10.
18. Teupenhayn, R.; Altmann, G. Clause length and Menzerath's law. Glottometrika 1984, 6, 127-138.
19. Hernández-Fernández, A.; Baixeries, J.; Forns, N.; Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. Size of the whole versus number of parts in genomes. Entropy 2011, 13, 1465-1480.
20. Baixeries, J.; Hernández-Fernández, A.; Forns, N.; Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. The parameters of Menzerath-Altmann law in genomes. JQuant Linguistics, in press.
21. Makalowski, W. Not junk after all. Science 2003, 300, 1246-1247.
22. Yazgan, O.; Krebs, J. E. Noncoding but nonexpendable: transcriptional regulation by large noncoding RNA in eukaryotes. Biochem Cell Biol 2007, 85, 484-496.
23. Carninci, P. RNA dust: Where are the Genes? DNA Res 2010, 17, 51-59.
24. Pennisi, E. ENCODE project writes eulogy for junk DNA. Science 2012, 337, 1159-1161.
25. Taft, R. J.; Pheasant, M.; Mattick, J. S. The relationship between non-protein-coding DNA and eukaryotic complexity. Bioessays 2007, 29, 288-299.
26. Lyons, J. Linguistic Semantics, An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.: Cambridge, 1995.
27. Biber, D.; Johansson, S.; Leech, G.; Conrad, S.; Finegan, E. Chapter 1: Introduction: A corpus based approach to English grammar. In: Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English; Pearson: Harlow, 1999.
28. Chung, C.; Pennebaker, J. The psychological functions of function words. In: Social Communication; Fiedler, K., Ed.; Psychology Press: New York, 2007; pp 343-359.
29. Bloom, L. One Word at a Time. Mouton: The Hague, 1973.
30. Ke, J.; Yao, Y. Analysing language development from a network approach. J Quant Linguistics 2008, 15, 70-99.
31. Ferrer-i-Cancho, R.; Riordan, O.; Bollobás, B. The consequences of Zipf's law for syntax and symbolic reference. Proc Biol Sci 2005, 272, 561-565.
32. Maclay, H.; Osgood, C. E. Hesitation phenomena in sponatenous English speech. Word 1959, 15, 19-44.
33. Cramer, I. The parameters of the Altmann-Menzerath law. J Quant Linguistics 2005, 12, 41-52.
34. Siegel, M. E. A. Like: The discourse particle and semantics. J Semantics 2002, 19, 35-71.
35. Ye, Z. When 'empty words' are not empty: Examples from the semantic analyses of some 'emotional adverbs' in Mandarin Chinese. Aust J Linguistics 2004, 24, 139-161.
36. Häsler, J.; Samuelsson, T.; Strub, K. Useful 'junk': Alu RNAs in the human transcriptome. Cell Mol Life Sci 2007, 64, 1793-1800.
37. Bel-Enguix, G.; Jiménez-López, M. D. Genetic code and verbal language: Syntactic and semantic analogies. In: Biology, Computation and Linguistics. New Interdisciplinary Paradigms; Bel-Enguix, G.;Dahl, V.;Jiménez-López, M. D., Eds.; IOS Press: Amsterdam, 2011; pp 85-103.
38. Searls, D. B. The language of genes. Nature 2002, 420, 211-217.