Long-range fractal correlations in literary corpora

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the fractal structure of long human-language records by mapping large samples of texts onto time series. The particular mapping set up in this work is inspired on linguistic basis in the sense that is retains {\em the word} as the fundamental unit of communication. The results confirm that beyond the short-range correlations resulting from syntactic rules acting at sentence level, long-range structures emerge in large written language samples that give rise to long-range correlations in the use of words.