The predictive capabilities of mathematical models for the type-token relationship in English language corpora

We investigate the predictive capability of mathematical models of the type-token relationship applied to the vocabulary growth profiles of selected English language documents. We compare the existing Good-Toulmin and Heaps formulae with an alternative approach based on Bernoulli trial word selection from a fixed finite vocabulary using the Zipf and Zipf-Mandelbrot probability distributions. We make two major observations: firstly, while the...