  In this paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of
linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf--Mandelbrot law can
only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the
total number of words contained in some given corpus. In particular, we focus
our attention on the important deviations that become statistically relevant as
larger corpora are considered and that ultimately could be understood as
salient features of the underlying complex process of language generation.
Finally, it is shown that all the different observed regimes can be accurately
encompassed within a single mathematical framework recently introduced by C.
Tsallis.
