TY - JOUR A2 - Olivar, Gerard AU - Gromov, Vasilii A. AU - Migrina, Anastasia M. PY - 2017 DA - 2017/11/19 TI - A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System SP - 9212538 VL - 2017 AB - A natural language (represented by texts generated by native speakers) is considered as a complex system, and the type thereof to which natural languages belong is ascertained. Namely, the authors hypothesize that a language is a self-organized critical system and that the texts of a language are “avalanches” flowing down its word cooccurrence graph. The respective statistical characteristics for distributions of the number of words in the texts of English and Russian languages are calculated; the samples were constructed on the basis of corpora of literary texts and of a set of social media messages (as a substitution to the oral speech). The analysis found that the number of words in the texts obeys power-law distribution. SN - 1076-2787 UR - https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9212538 DO - 10.1155/2017/9212538 JF - Complexity PB - Hindawi KW - ER -