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What are the odds that a brand a new sentence is said every second? (self.linguistics)

submitted 2 weeks ago by sga to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

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(Cross posting from !stupid_questions@lemmings.world https://lemmings.world/post/25535229)

A brand new sentence is a sentence which we consider to have never been spoken or written, or thought of (at least the ones which are not recorded). And just swapping a noun with another noun (for example a name of a place or person) while may techinically be considered new sentence, it is not really matching the spirit of brand new sentence.

for the linguists, can you try to come up with a better estimate (better than just coming up (all the words)^(to the power average sentence length)). Maybe by using the description of using different forms of verbs (like we consider in NLP) (verbs which take DP, CP), then adding standard adjectives and finish with remaining grammar (sorry if I am getting it all wrong, it has been a while since I took my intro to linguistics class). Also, consider a morpheme less form. This exercise is for a more realistic guess.

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[–] sga 2 points 2 weeks ago

my guess would have been something like 5-10 words (maybe 7). Maybe in literature it would be much higher, as writing capabilities for people writing literature (technical or not) is much better than average stuff an average person says. Averages have to include less than 10 year olds, and even 5 year olds, which might have hard time having 10 words stringed together in a logical manner. Still seems crazy fact to me.