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Ein vergleichender Blick auf die Buchstabenverteilung im Anlaut und im Auslaut von Rufnamen, Familiennamen und Appellativa zeigt, dass die Rufnamen hinsichtlich ihrer Anlaut- und Auslautstruktur besonders distinkt sind. Familiennamen hingegen zeigen sowohl Charakteristika der alphabetischen Verteilung von Appellativen wie von Rufnamen, sind also weniger distinkt, durch die Mischung dieser Charakteristika aber auch als Gruppe gekennzeichnet.
According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a general theory of human language (cf. Best (1999) for a summary of possible theoretical positions). Due to their formal proximity to methods used in the so-called exact sciences, theoretical explanations of this kind are assumed to be superior to the supposedly descriptive-only approaches of linguistic structuralism and its successors. In this paper I shall try to argue that on close inspection such claims turn out to be highly problematic, both on linguistic and on science-theoretical grounds.