In this paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of lingui
stics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf-Mandelbrot law can only d
escribe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the to
tal number of words contained in some given corpus. In particular, we focus
our attention on the important deviations that become statistically releva
nt as larger corpora are considered and that ultimately could be understood
as salient features of the underlying complex process of language generati
on. Finally, it is shown that all the different observed regimes can be acc
urately encompassed within a single mathematical framework recently introdu
ced by C. Tsallis. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.