Linguistic laws, the common statistical patterns of human language, have been investigated
by quantitative linguists for nearly a century. Recently, biologists from a range of disciplines …

Identifying universal principles underpinning diverse natural systems is a key goal of the life
sciences. A powerful approach in addressing this goal has been to test whether patterns …

Zipf's law is a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language
as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for …

Studies testing linguistic laws outside language have provided important insights into the
organization of biological systems. For example, patterns consistent with Zipf's law of …

Communication needs to be complex enough to be functional while minimizing learning and
production costs. Recent work suggests that the vocalizations and gestures of some …

Menzerath's law is a quantitative linguistic law which states that, on average, the longer is a
linguistic construct, the shorter are its constituents. In contrast, Menzerath-Altmann's law …

A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a
decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on …

The pioneering research of GK Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other
word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law …

In his pioneering research, GK Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more
meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of …

Organizational patterns can be shared across biological systems, and revealing the factors
shaping common patterns can provide insight into fundamental biological mechanisms. The …