Once again about the hapax grammar: Epigenetic Linguistics

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we deal with the similarity between epigenetic marks in DNA and hapax legomena in language; based on the so-called hapaxes, a grammar description is designed. We reflect hapax analysis of Czech language provided by Novotná (2013) and avoid random selection of the corpus. For this reason, we analyze a corpus of 12 authentic books from 12 authors who elaborated the theme “What’s new in…” concerning their field of science, assigned by Nová beseda publishing. By analyzing a middle-sized corpus, we expected results similar to those of large-scale national corpus (see Novotná 2013). We chose to classify hapaxes into different categories in comparison to Novotná, yet the results show similar language productive categories. This kind of language potentiality seems to be analogical to epigenetic processes in biology, which is briefly introduced.