Word frequency–rank relationship in tagged texts

Abstract

We analyze the frequency–rank relationship in sub-vocabularies corresponding to three different grammatical classes (nouns, verbs, and others) in a collection of literary works in English, whose words have been automatically tagged according to their grammatical role. Comparing with a null hypothesis which assumes that words belonging to each class are uniformly distributed across the frequency–ranked vocabulary of the whole work, we disclose statistically significant differences between the three classes. This results point to the fact that frequency–rank relationships may reflect linguistic features associated with grammatical function.