Word Length Distribution in German Texts during the 17^th-19^th Century

ABSTRACT

Word length in German texts has been a frequently discussed issue in the field of quantitative linguistics. Taking an overall view of the existing research data, however, most of the research focuses on literary texts and private letters and the size of data corpus for each research is relatively small. This paper provides a time- and genre-based analysis of word length distribution in German using 360 texts originated between the 17^th and 19^th centuries, aiming to find a probability distribution that can capture well the German word length distribution from a diachronic perspective and to reveal the relationship between the word length distribution and boundary conditions such as the genre and the creation time of text. Results indicate that the word length distribution in German texts written in different eras abides by the 1-displaced hyper-Poisson distribution, whose parameters (a, b) are interconnected with boundary conditions. This study corroborates that the word length distribution of a certain language is consistent, due to the constraint of the cognitive mechanism. Besides, the parameters of probability distribution can be good indicators of the writing style as well as the creation time of text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the course of evolution, there are five stages of development of the German language (in another word, High German). 800–1050: Old High German; 1050–1350: Middle High German; 1350–1650: Early High German; 1650–1945: New High German; the German language from 1945 up to the present (cf. Bastert et al., 2018). The texts analysed in this study are mainly written in New High German.

2. Original text: je mehr Texte man berücksichtigt, desto weniger Verteilungen kommen meist als gemeinsamer Nenner infrage.

3. 10 of the 26 texts from the German magazine Der Spiegel, 3 of them from the storybook Kleine Bettlektüre für den vielseitigen Zwilling. The rest of the texts are letters and poems from Goethe or Schiller.