Fractal Illusions: An Experimental Study of Long-Range Sentence-Length Correlations in Randomly Generated Natural Language Texts

Abstract

This study re-evaluates the assumption that long-range correlations in sentence length are a fundamental feature of natural language and a marker of literary style. While previous research has suggested that punctuation marks--particularly full stops--generate structural regularities in narrative texts, our experiments challenge this view. Using Chinese as the primary language, supplemented with English, we constructed randomized linguistic sequences through three distinct methods. Surprisingly, these randomized texts also exhibit long-range correlations in sentence length, some even with stronger fractal characteristics than those found in canonical literary works. These findings suggest that the presence of long-range correlations in sentence length is not sufficient to indicate authorial intention, structural depth, or literary value. We argue that punctuation-induced long-range correlations have limited value for literary stylistic analysis and cannot be considered a fundamental characteristic of human writing.