Search

The concept of representativeness is the main distinguishing characteristic of specialised corpora in comparison to other sets of texts. The Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing currently comprises four published subcorpora (astronomy, life sciences, history, and philosophy) plus three others under compilation (physics, chemistry and linguistics). In this paper we aim to assess the lexical density of the text samples in CETA, the Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy, by means of the ReCor tool, a posteriori. The study is motivated by the following question: does quantitative representativeness analysis using ReCor provide, in the form of a cross-check, further validation of previous research on the representativeness of CETA? Previous work (Crespo and Moskowich, 2010) has indicated that the CETA corpus is well designed and valid for the purposes for which it was intended. We will here suggest metrics to measure these findings. The most important contribution of this study is to offer quantitative data collection results using the ReCor tool, which allows data triangulation and consequently ensures overall data quality. Results show that data analysis with the ReCor tool supports previous findings, and thus we are able to verify that CETA is indeed representative of the language of its time and register.

Copyright of Revue d'Économie Régionale & urbaine is the property of Librairie Armand Colin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The linguistic constituents that come to express path are often co-opted into more abstract schematic constructions through a diachronic process known as constructionalization. This applies to the way too intensifier construction, whose origin I retrace to a former away too construction. Moreover, the emergence of a schematic construction is associated with an evolution of its type frequency (the total number of different linguistic units that fill the free slot of the construction). Although the evolution of the token frequency throughout a constructionalization process has already been studied from a quantitative perspective, the type frequency has not received such an empirical characterization. I show that the type and token frequencies are related with one another through a Zipf’s law, whose coefficient varies with time, and which sorts the different types according to their collocate frequency in a way that is robust both across time and across varieties of English.

This article analyzes the dynamic of Brazilian system of cities illustrating the growth of Brazilian population through its own historical peculiarities like internal and international immigration, industrialization, metropolization. Urban hierarchy is revealed by means of the Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s model is used to describe the mechanisms of urban growth. Deviations from this model were explained by studying the specific trajectories of five different classes of cities, on various time scales (from 1872 to 2010 and from 1960 to 2010). These deviations highlight different kinds of factors (political, economic, localization of resources and historical accidents) that shaped the Brazilian system during the last century.

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit (“city”) and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf’s and Gibrat’s model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.

Markedness is commonly regarded as one of the fundamental organizing principles of human language. However, the reasons for the existence of markedness phenomena continue to be controversial, if not to say obscure. The analysis of discourse corpora from three genetically unrelated languages which is conducted in this study suggests that at least one of the decisive aspects of markedness, namely, the correlation between frequency and structural complexity, can be understood as a necessary consequence of the general statistical regularities disclosed in Zipf's discourse-based model of language.

Zipf’s law is one of the main features in regional sciences, when it comes in studying urban systems’ organization. By recalling the most representative studies on this issue, over the last thirty years, this paper aims to focus on the main controversies that characterize the rank-size models, that is, the use of a truncated city-size distribution and the method of estimating the Pareto exponent. The recent introduction of the rank-size models in a more dynamic approach opens up new perspectives in understanding the Zipf law, as the latter becomes the outcome of an urban growth process.

The Tunisian urban system analysis since independence in 1956 shows a primatial system where the relation between the capital city (Tunis) and second city increases despite the decrease of the urban weight of Tunis since 1956. This primarily affects some regionals cities like Sfax and Kairouan and can be explained by the regional life weakness. The analysis based on the Rank Size Rule shows that the demographic weakness is often compensate by the functional weight.