  Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things
through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence.
The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words.
Using an ordinal pattern approach, we present an analysis of lexical
statistical connections for 11 major languages. We find that the diverse
manners that languages utilize to express word relations give rise to unique
pattern structural distributions. Furthermore, fluctuations of these pattern
distributions for a given language can allow us to determine both the
historical period when the text was written and its author. Taken together, our
results emphasize the relevance of ordinal time series analysis in linguistic
typology, historical linguistics and stylometry.
