Zipf

[Dave Monroe]

>From Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear
History (New York: Zone, 1997), S. III, "Memes and
Norms," Ch. 8, "Arguments and Operators," pp. 215-26
...

"... as is well known, human beings do not learn their
mother tongues as a set of rules.  Indeed, it was the
well-documented ability of children to learn language
by being exposed to adult conversation ... that
motivated the postulation of an inborn automaton in
the first place.  But if a set of rules is not the
source of the combinatorial productivity of language,
then what is?
   "One possible answer is that words carry with them,
as part of their meaning, 'combinatorial
constraints'that allow them to restrict the kinds of
words with which they may be combined.  That is, in
this view individual words carry information about
their frequency of co-occurence with other words, so
that, as a given word is added to a sentence, this
information exerts demands on the word or kind of word
that may occur next....  Combinatorial productivity
would not result from a central body of rules, but
from a decentralized process in which each word
locally restricts the spealer's choices at each point
in teh construction.  One version of this alternate
way of handling the production of sentences was
proposed long ago by the linguist George K. Zipf, who
was perhaps the first to study language as 'stuff,'
that is, as a large body of material inscriptions
exhibiting certain statistical regularities.  Zipf
called the tendency fof words to occur next to each
other their degree of crystallization: 'To illustrate
the comparative degrees of dependence of words in
sentence -structure, let us perform an imaginary
experiment.  We may take as material a vast number of
English sentneces ....  Figuratively speaking we shall
now dash these sentences on the floor with such force
that they will break, and pieces of them will scatter.
 Of course, some of the words, being more crystallized
in arrangement than others, will cohere...'" (p. 219)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=4052

Zipf, George K.  The Psycho-Biology of Language:
   An Introduction to Dynamic Philology.
   Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres, 1965 [1935].

Zipf's Principle of Least Effort
32; George Kingsley Zipf (1902--1950) wrote Human
Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort which was
published in 1949. The Principle predicts that most
people, most of the time, are turned back by modest
hurdles that they know could be overcome, with effort.
To be habitual, an action must be relatively
effortless or carry a particularly large psychic
reward. And in what constitutes a "large reward,"
opinions and motivations vary widely across
individuals. 

As Robert Heinlein wrote in Time Enough for Love: "The
Principle of Least Effort: 'Progress doesn't come from
early risers--progress is made by lazy men looking for
easier ways to do things.'"

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/x-z.html

The following thread occurred on the Pynchon List in
October 1996:

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/info.html#zipf

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