It is shown that this relation is not just proportional. They show that all of these hypotheses can for the present be accepted as valid for the languages English, German and Dutch. The present paper deals with some problems of the analysis of the word-frequency distribution and the possibility of its analytical description. The results of the individual correlational analyses are compared, related to each other, and given an overall interpretation. The reason for that is the assumption that words of different lengths in texts don't occur chaotically but follow stochastic laws.
Word length is measured in terms of the number of syllables.
In most languages it is a characteristic feature that lexical parts contain words of different length. Thus, the distribution of word length can be used to characterize texts and language itself. The present analysis tries to give a first contribution to the word length distribution of a variety of Portuguese, namely Brazilian Portuguese. The sources of all processed texts of the survey were two Brazilian newspapers, which take a stand on topics like Brazilian literature, language, culture and history. The examination defines specific criteria of measuring and counting word lengths in texts and modifies those criteria according to the characteristic features of the Portuguese language and concerning the Portuguese orthographical conventions.