Universal versus system-specific features of punctuation usage patterns in~major Western~languages

TL;DR

This study analyzes punctuation patterns across seven Western languages, revealing universal statistical features characterized by Weibull distribution parameters, while also highlighting language-specific differences in punctuation usage and flexibility.

Contribution

It demonstrates that punctuation interval distributions are universally modeled by two Weibull parameters, which are language-specific and can reflect translation effects.

Findings

Punctuation intervals follow a Weibull distribution across languages.

English exhibits the least constrained punctuation pattern.

Language-specific Weibull parameters correlate with punctuation flexibility.

Abstract

The celebrated proverb that "speech is silver, silence is golden" has a long multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts punctuation can in fact be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the virtue of effectively speaking and writing involves - often decisively - the capacity to apply the properly placed breaks. In the present study, based on a large corpus of world-famous and representative literary texts in seven major Western languages, it is shown that the distribution of intervals between consecutive punctuation marks in almost all texts can universally be characterised by only two parameters of the discrete Weibull distribution which can be given an intuitive interpretation in terms of the so-called hazard function. The values of these two parameters tend to be language-specific, however, and even appear to navigate translations. The properties of the computed hazard functions indicate that among the studied languages, English turns out to be the least constrained by the necessity to place a consecutive punctuation mark to partition a sequence of words. This may suggest that when compared to other studied languages, English is more flexible, in the sense of allowing longer uninterrupted sequences of words. Spanish reveals similar tendency to only a bit lesser extent.