Complete asymptotic type-token relationship for growing complex systems with inverse power-law count rankings
Pablo Rosillo-Rodes, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, and Peter Sheridan Dodds
Physical Review Research, 8, L012029, 2026

Times cited: 0
Abstract:
The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary entries), an inverse power-law scaling $S \sim r^{-\alpha}$ between type count $S$ and type rank $r$, widely known as Zipf's law, is widely observed to varying degrees of fidelity. A secondary, summary relationship is Heaps' law, which states that the number of types scales sublinearly with the total number of observed tokens present in a growing system. Here, we propose an idealized model of a growing system that (1) deterministically produces arbitrary inverse power-law count rankings for types, and (2) allows us to determine the exact asymptotics of the type-token relationship. Our argument improves upon and remedies earlier work. We obtain a unified asymptotic expression for all values of $\alpha$, which corrects the special cases of $\alpha = 1$ and $\alpha \gg 1$. Our approach relies solely on the form of count rankings, avoids unnecessary approximations, and does not involve any stochastic mechanisms or sampling processes. We thereby demonstrate that a general type-token relationship arises solely as a consequence of Zipf's law.
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BibTeX:
@article{rosillo-rodes2026a,
author = {Rosillo-Rodes, Pablo and H\'{e}bert-Dufresne, Laurent
and Dodds, Peter Sheridan},
title = {Complete asymptotic type-token relationship for
growing complex systems with inverse power-law count
rankings},
journal = {Physical Review Research},
year = {2026},
key = {},
volume = {8},
number = {1},
pages = {L012029},
url = {https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/q9w5-7k3j},
}