Are most sentences unique? An empirical examination of Chomskyan claims

Abstract

A repeated claim in linguistics is that the majority of linguistic utterances are unique. For example, Pinker (1994: 10), summarizing an argument by Noam Chomsky, states that "virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe." With the increased availability of large corpora, this is a claim that can be empirically investigated. The current paper addresses the question by using the NLTK Python library to parse corpora of different genres, providing counts of exact string matches in each. Results show that while completely unique sentences are often the majority of corpora, this is highly constrained by genre, and that duplicate sentences are not an insignificant part of any individual corpus.