Last update: 1 October, 2023.
Launched: 27 December, 2011.
Note: the largest public bibliography of references on Zipf’s law for word frequencies is available here. Here we only offer a selection of references on Zipf’s law on animal behavior and organic chemistry.
Hint for browsing: Heaps’ law is another name for Herdan’s law.
2016
Hernández-Fernández, Antoni; Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon
The Infochemical Core Journal Article
In: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 133-153, 2016.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Polytextuality (polytexty) versus rank
@article{doi:10.1080/09296174.2016.1142323,
title = {The Infochemical Core},
author = {Antoni Hern\'{a}ndez-Fern\'{a}ndez and Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2016.1142323},
doi = {10.1080/09296174.2016.1142323},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
journal = {Journal of Quantitative Linguistics},
volume = {23},
number = {2},
pages = {133-153},
publisher = {Routledge},
abstract = {Vocalizations, and less often gestures, have been the object of linguistic research for decades. However, the development of a general theory of communication with human language as a particular case requires a clear understanding of the organization of communication through other means. Infochemicals are chemical compounds that carry information and are employed by small organisms that cannot emit acoustic signals of an optimal frequency to achieve successful communication. Here, we investigate the distribution of infochemicals across species when they are ranked by their degree or the number of species with which they are associated (because they produce them or are sensitive to them). We evaluate the quality of the fit of different functions to the dependency between degree and rank by means of a penalty for the number of parameters of the function. Surprisingly, a double Zipf (a Zipf distribution with two regimes, each with a different exponent) is the model yielding the best fit although it is the function with the largest number of parameters. This suggests that the worldwide repertoire of infochemicals contains a core which is shared by many species and is reminiscent of the core vocabularies found for human language in dictionaries or large corpora.},
keywords = {Polytextuality (polytexty) versus rank},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
Vocalizations, and less often gestures, have been the object of linguistic research for decades. However, the development of a general theory of communication with human language as a particular case requires a clear understanding of the organization of communication through other means. Infochemicals are chemical compounds that carry information and are employed by small organisms that cannot emit acoustic signals of an optimal frequency to achieve successful communication. Here, we investigate the distribution of infochemicals across species when they are ranked by their degree or the number of species with which they are associated (because they produce them or are sensitive to them). We evaluate the quality of the fit of different functions to the dependency between degree and rank by means of a penalty for the number of parameters of the function. Surprisingly, a double Zipf (a Zipf distribution with two regimes, each with a different exponent) is the model yielding the best fit although it is the function with the largest number of parameters. This suggests that the worldwide repertoire of infochemicals contains a core which is shared by many species and is reminiscent of the core vocabularies found for human language in dictionaries or large corpora.