Often considered a linguistics topic, corpus analysis is the study of language use in a corpus, often analyzing the distribution of various phenomena (phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc). Sometimes the analysis is performed comparing across time, languages, or different genres.

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

• Zipf 1935 - The Psycho-Biology of Language (book)
• Bull 1952 - Problems of Vocabulary Frequency and Distribution An interesting read, from here.
• 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. Talks about types and tokens. Introduces the terms “function words” and “content words” on p. 377 (p. 8 in the pdf).

• George Armitage Miller
• George Kingsley Zipf