How will text size influence the length of its linguistic constituents?

Abstract

Abstract As human language is a multi-level complex adaptive system, a text can be seen as emergent from the complex interactions between internal and external factors. Text types such as microblog have size restriction, an external variable which may affect relevant quantitative properties of the texts themselves. Such texts provide a good opportunity to investigate the interactions between the external and internal factors of human language from the perspective of complex adaptive system. This study focuses on how the size restriction of Chinese microblog texts affects the length of their sentences and clauses. Quantitative properties concerning sentence and clause length of Chinese microblog texts are analyzed and compared with those of texts with no size restriction (i.e., prose, news report and romantic fiction). Analysis of sentence length distribution shows that size restriction has an impact on sentence length measured by numbers of words and clauses. The correlation between sentence length and clause length is examined with Menzerath-Altmann law. The satisfying fitting result of microblog texts probably suggests that, language units are able to re-organize and re-regulate their structures according to relevant external factors, until they reach a balanced new system.

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