  Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long
sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may
reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a
systematic statistical analysis of the use of words in literary English
corpora. We show that there is a quantitative relation between the role of
content words in literary English and the Shannon information entropy defined
over an appropriate probability distribution. Without assuming any previous
knowledge about the syntactic structure of language, we are able to cluster
certain groups of words according to their specific role in the text.

Statistical Mechanics;Computation and Language