Prawo Shermana

• Authors: Agnieszka Kułacka

Title variants

EN

Sherman’s Law

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The aim of this article is to familiarise the audience with Sherman’s laws, which is a set of laws describing the average sentence -length of texts and possible models describing distributions of sentence- -lengths in texts with respect to either number of clauses or words. We also confi rm Sherman’s conclusion regarding the invariance of an average sentence -length in a given text. However, after the analysis of our data we concluded that this length does not depend on a sort of text, neither on language used. We also analysed the distributions of sentence -length with respect to the number of clauses and concluded that the characteristics of the possible statistical models are positive skewness of the data and general indeterminacy of the shape of a density function or its dependence on a given text.

• Publisher: Księgarnia Akademicka
• Journal: LingVaria : Półrocznik Wydziału Polonistyki UJ poświęcony zagadnieniom języka i językoznawstwa
• Year: 2010
• Issue: 1(9)
• Pages: 9-17

Contributors

author

Agnieszka Kułacka

• King’s College London
• University of London

References

• ALTMANN, G., 1992, Sherman’s Laws of Sentence Length Distribution, What is language synergetics?, „Acta Universitatis Ouluensis” 16, s. 38–39.
• KUŁACKA, A., 2008, Badania nad prawem Menzeratha-Altmanna, ,,LingVaria” nr 2 (6), s. 167–174.
• SHERMAN, L. A., 1888, Some Observations upon the Sentence-Length in English Prose, ,,University Studies” 1, nr 2, s. 119–130.