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 …

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 …

A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept
of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the …

The length of language units, such as word length or sentence length, plays a critical role in
register classification studies. However, in this line of work, little attention has been paid to …

Diverse information encoding systems, including human language, the vocal and gestural
systems of non-human animals and the structure of DNA and proteins, have been found to …

Information compression is widely regarded as a fundamental principle that applies to
human language. Zipf's law of abbreviation and Menzerath–Altmann's law are two linguistic …

Human languages are often claimed to fundamentally differ from other communication
systems. But what is it exactly that unites them as a separate category? This article proposes …

The present paper explores the synchronic variations and diachronic changes in political
discourses in Hong Kong (HK) and in Mainland of People's Republic of China (PRC). The …

This article examines the presence of the empirical tendency known as the Menzerath–
Altmann Law (MAL) on protein secondary structures. MAL is related to optimization …

Previous studies have explored the validity of the Menzerath-Altmann law in spoken
languages from a physical perspective. It has been found that this law fits better when the …