Linguistic laws in biology

Abstract

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 have started to explore the prevalence of these laws beyond language, finding patterns consistent with linguistic laws across multiple levels of biological organisation, from molecular (genomes, genes, and proteins) to organismal (animal behaviour) to ecological (populations and ecosystems). We propose a new conceptual framework for the study of linguistic laws in biology, comprising and integrating distinct levels of analysis, from description to prediction to theory building. Adopting this framework will provide critical new insights into the fundamental rules of organisation underpinning natural systems, unifying linguistic laws and core theory in biology.

References in corpus (19)

• Zipf's Law in Gene Expression
• Large-scale analysis of Zipf's law in English texts
• Compression as a universal principle of animal behavior
• Optimal coding and the origins of Zipfian laws
• Pearle's Hidden-Variable Model Revisited
• Compression and the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies
• Statistical laws in linguistics
• The origins of Zipf's meaning-frequency law
• Testing statistical laws in complex systems
• Optimization models of natural communication
• The failure of the law of brevity in two New World primates. Statistical caveats
• Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language
• The span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences
• The distinct flavors of Zipf's law in the rank-size and in the size-distribution representations, and its maximum-likelihood fitting
• Log-log Convexity of Type-Token Growth in Zipf's Systems
• The brevity law as a scaling law, and a possible origin of Zipf's law for word frequencies
• The challenges of statistical patterns of language: the case of Menzerath's law in genomes
• When is Menzerath-Altmann law mathematically trivial? A new approach
• The law of brevity in macaque vocal communication is not an artifact of analyzing mean call durations

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Direct and indirect evidence of compression of word lengths. Zipf's law of abbreviation revisited
• Parallels of human language in the behavior of bottlenose dolphins
• The optimal placement of the head in the noun phrase. The case of demonstrative, numeral, adjective and noun
• Range-Limited Heaps' Law for Functional DNA Words in the Human Genome
• On the class of coding optimality of human languages and the origins of Zipf's law
• Dependency distance minimization predicts compression
• Thermodynamic stability and structural transitions in virus-host networks
• Quadratic Term Correction on Heaps' Law