The Applicability of Zipf's Law in Report Text

Zipf's Law, discovered by Harvard linguist Zipf in the 1940s, is an empirical Law reflecting the general rule of word frequency distribution in language. It describes the link between word frequency (F) and its frequency rank (R) as F×R=C (constant)[1]. A large number of studies have been conducted to test the applicability of Zipf's Law in various languages and diverse text types. However, as language keeps developing and changing, there is a continuous need for the verification of Zipf's Law in the most up-to-date materials and texts in different languages. In addition, different categories of texts should be taken into consideration. Based on this, this study selected the report of the 20th National Congress and its multilingual translations, which contain English, Spanish, and Russian, as our research objects. We used AntConc to detect the distribution of their word frequency and found that all of these report texts of four languages conform to Zipf's Law, and there is a slight difference in terms of fitness degree between the Russian text and the other three. We assumed that it is mainly caused by the limited text length and the translation process.