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← Language & CommunicationAn engineer analyzing a multilingual text corpus notices skewed word frequency distributions. Which mechanism best explains this variation, assuming consistent document sizes?
A)Random lexical diffusion dominates uniformly
B)Zipf's law combined with language features✓
C)Universal grammar imposes uniform distribution
D)Syntactic priming minimizes word variation
💡 Explanation
Zipf's law describes a power-law relationship between word frequency and rank, predicting skewed distributions, because each language's features interact differently with this statistical principle. Therefore, Zipf's Law explains the skewed distribution, rather than uniform distribution from Universal Grammar, random lexical diffusion, or priming effects.
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