POWER LAWS AND OTHER HEAVY-TAILED DISTRIBUTIONS IN LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY

The paper investigates the quantitative distribution of language types across languages of the world. The studies are based on three large-scale typological data bases: The World Color Survey, the Automated Similarity Judgment Project data base, and the World Atlas of Language Structures. The main finding is that a surprisingly large and varied collection of linguistic typologies show power law behavior. The bulk of the paper deals with the statistical validation of these findings.