Q: could this perhaps be called a fractal relationship — i am not an expert, which probably explains my stupid question >>
“According to this concept the word-frequency distribution of a text, with a certain length written by a single author, has the same characteristics as a text of the same length extracted from an imaginary complete infinite corpus written by the same author.”

Thanks in advance for answering me. Regards, Jaap Bloem

Sebastian to me:
It is not a stupid question, however my answer would be no. I don’t think it could be called a fractal relation because the term fractal indicates a scale invariant property. It means roughly that something should look the same at any scale, for example size. The sentence you quote could, in itself, apply to a fractal system but our results for real texts suggests that there is a size (length) dependence on properties like the average frequency or the exponents ‘alpha’ and ‘gamma’. So, even though the word-frequency distribution looks the same for a short text and a section of a long text (of the same length), both of them are different from the long text.

I hope my reply makes any sense. Please ask me if you have more questions.

Best regards,
Sebastian Bernhardsson