title: The dimensionality of discourse.
abstract: The paragraph spaces of five text corpora, of different genres and intended audiences, in four different languages, all show the same two-scale structure, with the dimension at short distances being lower than at long distances. In all five cases the short-distance dimension is approximately eight. Control simulations with randomly permuted word instances do not exhibit a low dimensional structure. The observed topology places important constraints on the way in which authors construct prose, which may be universal.
authors.affiliation: Center for Integrated Plasma Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
authors.forename: Isidoros
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Doxas
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dennis
authors.forename: William L
authors.initials: WL
authors.lastname: Oliver
mesh_terms: D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012660:Semantics; D013782:Textbooks as Topic; D014956:Writing