Corominas Murtra, BernatFortuny Andreu, JordiSolé, Ricard V.2020-05-282020-05-282011-03-281539-3755https://hdl.handle.net/2445/162797Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback's Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Therefore, using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf's law is the only expected outcome of an evolving communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf.7 p.application/pdfeng(c) American Physical Society, 2011ComunicacióModels matemàticsCommunicationMathematical modelsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/article6347172020-05-28info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess