分析乔伊斯《芬尼根守灵夜》的标点模式,发现其标点间距分布异常且具多重分形特征。
Statistics of punctuation in experimental literature -- the remarkable case of "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce
- 统计标点间词数分布,发现多数文学作品符合离散威布尔分布。
- 《芬尼根守灵夜》标点尾部更厚,风险函数递减,偏离常规文本规律。
- 该书句子长度自由度高,呈现长程非线性关联与显著多重分形性。
近期研究显示,书面文本中标点符号的分布结构会形成具有普适性的模式。基于大量经典文学作品,标点间词数距离通常服从离散威布尔分布——一种常用于生存分析的离散型分布。本文将此分析扩展至更多实验性世界文学作品,发现标点间距大多仍符合该分布。但詹姆斯·乔伊斯的部分作品尤为特殊:其分布尾部显著更厚,对应风险函数为递减,这在典型散文文本中未见。其中,《芬尼根守灵夜》尤为突出,甚至因科学贡献而使“夸克”一词诞生于此。同时,在所有研究文本中,句子长度(即句末标点间距离)表现出更高自由度,不受离散威布尔分布约束,部分文本展现出长程非线性相关性,表现为多重分形特征,而《芬尼根守灵夜》在此方面尤为显著。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As the recent studies indicate, the structure imposed onto written texts by the presence of punctuation develops patterns which reveal certain characteristics of universality. In particular, based on a large collection of classic literary works, it has been evidenced that the distances between consecutive punctuation marks, measured in terms of the number of words, obey the discrete Weibull distribution - a discrete variant of a distribution often used in survival analysis. The present work extends the analysis of punctuation usage patterns to more experimental pieces of world literature. It turns out that the compliance of the the distances between punctuation marks with the discrete Weibull distribution typically applies here as well. However, some of the works by James Joyce are distinct in this regard - in the sense that the tails of the relevant distributions are significantly thicker and, consequently, the corresponding hazard functions are decreasing functions not observed in typical literary texts in prose. "Finnegans Wake" - the same one to which science owes the word "quarks" for the most fundamental constituents of matter - is particularly striking in this context. At the same time, in all the studied texts, the sentence lengths - representing the distances between sentence-ending punctuation marks - reveal more freedom and are not constrained by the discrete Weibull distribution. This freedom in some cases translates into long-range nonlinear correlations, which manifest themselves in multifractality. Again, a text particularly spectacular in terms of multifractality is "Finnegans Wake".
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