Papers › Is space a word, too?
Is space a word, too?
Jake Ryland Williams, Giovanni C. Santia
For words, rank-frequency distributions have long been heralded for adherence to a potentially-universal phenomenon known as Zipf's law. The hypothetical form of this empirical phenomenon was refined by Ben\^{i}ot Mandelbrot to that which is presently referred to as the Zipf-Mandelbrot law. Parallel to this, Herbet Simon proposed a selection model potentially explaining Zipf's law. However, a significant dispute between Simon and Mandelbrot, notable empirical exceptions, and the lack of a strong empirical connection between Simon's model and the Zipf-Mandelbrot law have left the questions of universality and mechanistic generation open. We offer a resolution to these issues by exhibiting how the dark matter of word segmentation, i.e., space, punctuation, etc., connect the Zipf-Mandelbrot law to Simon's mechanistic process. This explains Mandelbrot's refinement as no more than a fudge factor, accommodating the effects of the exclusion of the rank-frequency dark matter. Thus, integrating these non-word objects resolves a more-generalized rank-frequency law. Since this relies upon the integration of space, etc., we find support for the hypothesis that all are generated by common processes, indicating from a physical perspective that space is a word, too.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections