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Published online 21 September 2001 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news010927-1
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Physicists decode the Bard
The distribution of a word in a text can show whether it is a noun or a verb.
Two physicists may have found a hidden structure in the English language1. One can guess the syntactic or grammatical character of a word without knowing its meaning, they say, because different types of word are scattered differently through written texts, rather as certain wild flowers grow in certain parts of a meadow.
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