This volume explores the universal mathematical properties underlying big language data and
possible reasons why such properties exist revealing how we may be unconsciously mathematical
in our language use. These properties are statistical and thus different from linguistic
universals that contribute to describing the variation of human languages and they can only be
identified over a large accumulation of usages. The book provides an overview of state-of-the
art findings on these statistical universals and reconsiders the nature of language accordingly
with Zipf's law as a well-known example.The main focus of the book further lies in explaining
the property of long memory which was discovered and studied more recently by borrowing
concepts from complex systems theory. The statistical universals not only possibly lie as the
precursor of language system formation but they also highlight the qualities of language that
remain weak points in today's machine learning.In summary this book provides an overview of
language's global properties. It will be of interest to anyone engaged in fields related to
language and computing or statistical analysis methods with an emphasis on researchers and
students in computational linguistics and natural language processing. While the book does
apply mathematical concepts all possible effort has been made to speak to a non-mathematical
audience as well by communicating mathematical content intuitively with concise examples taken
from real texts.
