  We analyze the rank-frequency distributions of words in selected English and
Polish texts. We compare scaling properties of these distributions in both
languages. We also study a few small corpora of Polish literary texts and find
that for a corpus consisting of texts written by different authors the basic
scaling regime is broken more strongly than in the case of comparable corpus
consisting of texts written by the same author. Similarly, for a corpus
consisting of texts translated into Polish from other languages the scaling
regime is broken more strongly than for a comparable corpus of native Polish
texts. Moreover, based on the British National Corpus, we consider the
rank-frequency distributions of the grammatically basic forms of words (lemmas)
tagged with their proper part of speech. We find that these distributions do
not scale if each part of speech is analyzed separately. The only part of
speech that independently develops a trace of scaling is verbs.
