Revisiting the Optimality of Word Lengths

Zipf posited that wordforms are optimized to minimize utterances’ communicative costs. He supported this claim by showing that words’ lengths are inversely correlated with their frequencies. This correlation, however, is only expected if one assumes that a words’ communicative cost is given by its length. We explore this assumption, comparing the predictive power over word lengths we get when assuming different operationalisations of communicative cost.

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