03-07-2019, 06:00 PM
(03-07-2019, 04:15 PM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Additionally, one file (attached) does apparently not even repeat 3-word strings. It's only 1762 words, which might explain a bit.
Still, I would seriously question the claim that natural languages cannot be without repeating "phrases". If the phrase is 4 words long, I have 9 counterexamples. Make the phrase 5 words long and 20% of checked texts don't repeat any.
The text of the VMS contains many frequently used words like <daiin>, <ol>, and <chedy>. A word can only be part of a repeated sequence if it occurs multiple times. It is therefore necessary to check if your text samples contain enough frequently used words. This is for instance not the case for your 1762 words text sample. The text sample is much smaller than the VMS-text and is using many rarely used words. Within the first 20 words even 14 words occur only once. But even in this text sample it is possible to find repeated two word sequences like "per locum" and "ad senem". It is also possible to find words distributed equally over the entire text like 'et' or 'ad'. They are probably function words (like conjunctions, articles, etc.). For the VMS-text such words don't exist (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 5).