Fractal Dimensions of Poetic and Recursive Repetition and Morphology: A Quantitative Study

Abstract

Fractal geometry in poetry and linguistics The relevance of fractal geometry to two linguistic phenomena (1) repetative structures in poetry and (2) recursive word formation in English morphology is investigated. By means of box-counting dimension and Hurst exponent analysis, we show that both poetic repetition and morphological recursion show a fractal-like tendency with self-similar patterns at different scales. In our studies with the Shakespearean sonnets we have found statistically significant features of lexical repetition patterns, associated with a fractal dimension of D = 1.26 ± 0.03, while the lexical-level patterns in morphological constructions like "unhappiness" exhibit recursive scaling properties and have dimension D = 1.18. For both aesthetic and linguistic patterns being resistant to conventional analytical methods, these observations imply that fractal geometry emerges as an effective framework for a quantitative treatment.