Often considered a linguistics topic, corpus analysis is the study of language use in a corpus, often analysing the distribution of various phenomena.

Zipf's law describes the frequency distribution of words in language.

• Zipf 1935 - The Psycho-Biology of Language (book)
• Miller & Newman 1958 - Tests of a Statistical Explanation of the Rank-Frequency Relation for Words in Written English A study on the UNIVAC computer
• Miller et al 1959 - Length-frequency statistics for written English, available here. A study of frequency statistics of words using the UNIVAC
• Bull 1952 - Problems of Vocabulary Frequency and Distribution An interesting read, from here.