This volume contains a collection of contributions to the science of language, focusing on the study of word length in particular. Within a synergetic framework, the word turns out to be a central linguistic unit, as is clearly outlined in the Editor's preface. The book's first chapter is an extensive introduction to the history and state of the art of word length studies.

The studies included unify contributions from three important linguistic fields, namely, linguistics and text analysis, mathematics and statistics, and corpus and data base design, which together give a comprehensive approach to the quantitative study of text and language and word length studies.

The broad spectrum of word length studies covered within this volume will be of interest to experts working in the fields of general linguistics, text scholarship and related fields, and, understanding language as one example of complex semiotic systems, the volume should be of interest for scholars from other fields as well.

Presents a collection of papers on the quantitative study of language, in particular word length studies

Inhalt
Introductory Remarks: On the Science of Language in Light of the Language of Science.- History and Methodology of Word Length Studies.- Information Content of Words in Texts.- Zero-Syllablewords in Determiningword Length.- Within-Sentence Distribution and Retention of Contentwords and function words.- On Text Corpora, Word Lengths, Andword Frequencies in Slovenian.- Text Corpus as an Abstract Data Structure.- About Word Length Distribution.- The Fall of the Jers in the Light of Menzerath's Law.- Towards the Foundations of Menzerath's Law.- Aspects of the Typology of Slavic Languages.- Multivariate Statistical Methods in Quantitative Text Analyses.- Word Length and Word Frequency.- Developing the Croatian National Corpus and Beyond.- About Word Length Counting in Serbian.- Word-Length Distribution in Present-Day Lower Sorbian Newspaper Texts.- Towards a Unified Derivation of Some Linguistic Laws.