  Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within
the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing
host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts
to disclose regularities, correlations, patterns, and structural properties of
language streams, using techniques borrowed from statistics and information
theory. Overall, results can still be categorized as modest, but the prospects
are promising: medium- and long-range features in the organization of human
language -which are beyond the scope of traditional linguistics- have already
emerged from this kind of analysis and continue to be reported, contributing a
new perspective to our understanding of this most complex communication system.
This short book is intended to review some of these recent contributions.
