TEACHER: JULIA ZARA
STUDENT:ROMÁRIO SILVA
ACTIVITY:DIAGNOSTIC SUMMARY
Longer words tend to carry more information.Linguists have tended to believe that the
length of a word was associated with how often it was used more frequently than long ones,
association proposed in the 1930's by the Harvard linguist Zipf.On the other hand, Steven
Piantadosi and colleagues say that to convey a given amount of information, it is better to
shorten the least informative, rather than the most frequent ones.Zipf's original association
is roughly correct.And this relationship of length to use seems to hold up in many
languages.In addition, it applies to both speech and text.Through analization of word use in
11 different European languages,Piantadosi and colleagues found that word length wa more
closely correlated with their information content than with how often they are used.This
landmark study may now supply '' the largest leap forward in 75 years'' in understanding
how the evolution of words is governed by the efficiency with which they can be used to
communicate.
Piantadosi and colleagues make the assumption that themore predictable a word is, the less
informative it is.We count up how often all pairs of words occur together in sequence,such
as ''the man'', ''the boy'', '' a man'' and so on. Then we use this count to estimate the
probability of aword conditioned on the previous word. According to theory, the
information content is then proportional to the negarive logarithm of this probability.
However,physicist Damian Zanette from Argentina says that this is typically determined by
several hundred surrounding words, not just a few.
Piantadosi and colleagues suggest that if shorter and briefer words carry less
information,then the density of information throughout a phrase will be smoothed
out.Thereby, the results suggest how the structure of language might aid communication.
Noam Chomsky have suggested that communication might not be the primary purpose of
language though.