Linguistic laws are not the law in chimpanzee sexual solicitation gestures.

Two language laws have been identified as manifestations of universal principles of animal behaviour, both acting on the organisation of numerous vocal and behavioural communicative systems. Zipf's law of brevity describes a negative relationship between behavioural length and frequency of behaviour. Menzerath's law defines a negative correlation between the number of behaviours in a sequence and average length of the behaviour composing it. Both laws have been linked with the information-theoretic principle of compression, which tends to minimise code length. We investigate the presence of these two laws in the repertoire of chimpanzee sexual solicitation gestures. We find that chimpanzee solicitation gestures do not follow either Zipf's law of brevity or Menzerath's law consistently. For the second time in ape gestural communication, evidence supporting Zipf's law of brevity was absent, and, here, the presence of Menzerath's law appears individually driven. Ape gesture does not appear to manifest a principle of compression or pressure for efficiency that has been previously proposed to be universal. Importantly, the same signals were shown to adhere to these laws when used in a different behavioural context; highlighting that signallers consider signalling efficiency broadly, and diverse factors play important roles in shaping investment in signal production.

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Linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rspb.2018.2900 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 286 (1896) ◽

pp. 20182900 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Raphaela Heesen ◽

Catherine Hobaiter ◽

Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho ◽

Stuart Semple

Keyword(s):

Word Length ◽

Negative Relationship ◽

Zipf’S Law ◽

Whole Body ◽

Gestural Communication ◽

Code Length ◽

Zipf's Law ◽

Information Theoretic ◽

Vocal Behaviour ◽

Frequency Of Use

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 abbreviation (which predicts a negative relationship between word length and frequency of use) have been found in the vocal and non-vocal behaviour of a range of animals, and patterns consistent with Menzerath's law (according to which longer sequences are made up of shorter constituents) have been found in primate vocal sequences, and in genes, proteins and genomes. Both laws have been linked to compression—the information theoretic principle of minimizing code length. Here, we present the first test of these laws in animal gestural communication. We initially did not find the negative relationship between gesture duration and frequency of use predicted by Zipf's law of abbreviation, but this relationship was seen in specific subsets of the repertoire. Furthermore, a pattern opposite to that predicted was seen in one subset of gestures—whole body signals. We found a negative correlation between number and mean duration of gestures in sequences, in line with Menzerath's law. These results provide the first evidence that compression underpins animal gestural communication, and highlight an important commonality between primate gesturing and language.

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Brevity is not a universal in animal communication: evidence for compression depends on the unit of analysis in small ape vocalizations

Royal Society Open Science ◽

10.1098/rsos.200151 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (4) ◽

pp. 200151 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Dena J. Clink ◽

Abdul Hamid Ahmad ◽

Holger Klinck

Keyword(s):

Animal Communication ◽

Biological Systems ◽

Negative Relationship ◽

Strong Support ◽

Zipf’S Law ◽

Support Vector ◽

Human Language ◽

Zipf's Law ◽

Unit Of Analysis ◽

Frequency Of Use

Evidence for compression, or minimization of code length, has been found across biological systems from genomes to human language and music. Two linguistic laws—Menzerath's Law (which states that longer sequences consist of shorter constituents) and Zipf's Law of abbreviation (a negative relationship between signal length and frequency of use)—are predictions of compression. It has been proposed that compression is a universal in animal communication, but there have been mixed results, particularly in reference to Zipf's Law of abbreviation. Like songbirds, male gibbons ( Hylobates muelleri ) engage in long solo bouts with unique combinations of notes which combine into phrases. We found strong support for Menzerath's Law as the longer a phrase, the shorter the notes. To identify phrase types, we used state-of-the-art affinity propagation clustering, and were able to predict phrase types using support vector machines with a mean accuracy of 74%. Based on unsupervised phrase type classification, we did not find support for Zipf's Law of abbreviation. Our results indicate that adherence to linguistic laws in male gibbon solos depends on the unit of analysis. We conclude that principles of compression are applicable outside of human language, but may act differently across levels of organization in biological systems.

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Study of Information-theoretic Properties of Arabic Based on Word Entropy and Zipf's Law

Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences ◽

10.1016/s1319-1578(98)80001-3 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

Ibrahim A. Al-Kadi

Keyword(s):

Zipf’S Law ◽

Zipf's Law ◽

Information Theoretic

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Types, Tokens, and Hapaxes: A New Heap’s Law

Glottotheory ◽

10.1515/glot-2018-0014 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 113-129

Author(s):

Victor Davis

Keyword(s):

First Principles ◽

Scaling Law ◽

Written Language ◽

Zipf’S Law ◽

Academic Press ◽

Zipf's Law ◽

New Words ◽

Size Dependent ◽

Link Type ◽

Combinatorial Model

Abstract Heap’s Law https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=539986 Heaps, H S 1978 Information Retrieval: Computational and Theoretical Aspects (Academic Press). states that in a large enough text corpus, the number of types as a function of tokens grows as N = K{M^\beta } for some free parameters K, \beta . Much has been written http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/15/9/093033 Font-Clos, Francesc 2013 A scaling law beyond Zipf’s law and its relation to Heaps’ law (New Journal of Physics 15 093033)., http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/11/12/123015 Bernhardsson S, da Rocha L E C and Minnhagen P 2009 The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language (New Journal of Physics 11 123015)., http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-5468/2011/07/P07013 Bernhardsson S, Ki Baek and Minnhagen 2011 A paradoxical property of the monkey book (Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, Volume 2011)., http://milicka.cz/kestazeni/type-token_relation.pdf Milička, Jiří 2009 Type-token & Hapax-token Relation: A Combinatorial Model (Glottotheory. International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2 (1), 99–110)., https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00943 Petersen, Alexander 2012 Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words (Scientific Reports volume 2, Article number: 943). about how this result and various generalizations can be derived from Zipf’s Law. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0052442 Zipf, George 1949 Human behavior and the principle of least effort (Reading: Addison-Wesley). Here we derive from first principles a completely novel expression of the type-token curve and prove its superior accuracy on real text. This expression naturally generalizes to equally accurate estimates for counting hapaxes and higher n-legomena.

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The Distribution of City Sizes in Turkey: A Failure of Zipf’s Law Due to Concavity

Regional Science Policy & Practice ◽

10.1111/rsp3.12449 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Hasan Engin Duran ◽

Andrzej Cieślik

Keyword(s):

Zipf’S Law ◽

Zipf's Law

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Dynamical approach to Zipf's law

Physical Review Research ◽

10.1103/physrevresearch.3.013084 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Giordano De Marzo ◽

Andrea Gabrielli ◽

Andrea Zaccaria ◽

Luciano Pietronero

Keyword(s):

Zipf’S Law ◽

Zipf's Law ◽

Dynamical Approach

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Optimization of morpheme length: a cross-linguistic assessment of Zipf’s and Menzerath’s laws

Linguistics Vanguard ◽

10.1515/lingvan-2019-0076 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (s3) ◽

Author(s):

Matthew Stave ◽

Ludger Paschen ◽

François Pellegrino ◽

Frank Seifart

Keyword(s):

Structural Information ◽

Unit Length ◽

Zipf’S Law ◽

Zipf's Law ◽

Linguistic Structure ◽

Morphological Complexity ◽

Linguistic Assessment ◽

Linguistic Units

Abstract Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and Menzerath’s Law both make predictions about the length of linguistic units, based on corpus frequency and the length of the carrier unit. Each contributes to the efficiency of languages: for Zipf, units are more likely to be reduced when they are highly predictable, due to their frequency; for Menzerath, units are more likely to be reduced when there are more sub-units to contribute to the structural information of the carrier unit. However, it remains unclear how the two laws work together in determining unit length at a given level of linguistic structure. We examine this question regarding the length of morphemes in spoken corpora of nine typologically diverse languages drawn from the DoReCo corpus, showing that Zipf’s Law is a stronger predictor, but that the two laws interact with one another. We also explore how this is affected by specific typological characteristics, such as morphological complexity.

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