Work

Emergence of Zipf’s law in the evolution of communication

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback's Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Therefore, using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf's law is the only expected outcome of an evolving communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf.

Source: Physical Review E

DOI: 10.1103/physreve.83.036115

Authors: Bernat Corominas-Murtra, Jordi Fortuny, Ricard V. Solé

Institutions: Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Santa Fe Institute

Language: English

Topic: Language and cultural evolution

Subfield: Cultural Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: James S. McDonnell Foundation, Santa Fe Institute, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

OpenAlex ID: W2096748633

FWCI: 132.1

Cites: 30

Cited by: 49

Related to: 10