Dynamic Philology
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After this work, George Kingsley Zipf seems to have turned his attention towards issues generally covered in fields such as sociology and psychology: National unity and disunity: The nation as a bio-social organism (1941), "The P1 P2/D Hypothesis: On the Intercity Movement of Persons" (1946), and Human behavior and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology (1949).
A .pdf of the whole 1935 book is here, all 336 pages of it — but you might want to start with the (22 pages of the) Preface and Introduction. The Introduction begins like this:
DYNAMIC PHILOLOGY has the ultimate goal of bringing the study of language more· into line with the exact sciences. To this end it views speech-production as a natural psychological and biological phenomenon to be investigated in the objective spirit of the exact sciences from which its methods have been taken. Our chief method of procedure is the application of statistical principles to the observable phenomena of the stream of speech.
In this introductory study our primary aim is the observation, measurement, and, as far as it is possible, the formulation into tentative laws of the underlying forces which impel and direct linguistic expression. Our first interest will be in the relationship which exists between the form of the various speech-elements and their behavior, in so far as this relationship is revealed statistically. The findings which result from this initial interest may be viewed as dynamic laws of speech with general applicability, though they are offered, of course, subject to future corrective experimentation. These dynamic laws can presumably be similarly demonstrated from the material of any known language.
Our second interest will be to relate the above dynamic laws with the familiar phenomena of meaning and emotional intensity which have generally proved elusive to direct quantitative analysis. The findings resulting from this second phase of our investigation may be taken only as inferential conclusions; their validity can be apprehended against the general statistical background of the dynamic laws, yet the conclusions themselves can probably never be established numerically because of the nature of the phenomena involved.
The uptake for this book among linguists was far from entirely positive, as illustrated by this passage from Martin Joos's 1936 review in Language.
In the present volume Zipf embraces the whole range of linguistic study and phenomena, from phonemes to 'the stream of speech and its relation to the totality of behavior'. Apparently nothing remains untouched within that range, and the treatment almost uniformly evidences a belief that the author has attained valid formulations. Further, the book is subtitled 'An Introduction to Dynamic Philology', and to judge from the text this means a comprehensive survey of an established science written by an adept. We may therefore take the book for a complete though perhaps not the definitive presentation of Zipf's doctrine, and consequently believe that this is a proper time and occasion to attempt a critique of that doctrine, of its substantiation, and of its application.
The thesis, very briefly stated, is that the key to the explanation of all synchronic and diachronic language-phenomena has been found in a statistically established tendency to maintain equilibrium between size and frequency. Previous critics found the conclusions rash and largely improbable; they placed the blame partly on the introduction of a new technique into linguistic study. If they conceived an unjustly harsh opinion of statistical method in linguistics, the mistake was a natural one, for there was no one to warn them where statistics left off and explanation began except Zipf himself. As the matter now stands, neither the usefulness of statistical method in linguistics nor the value of Zipf's daring and ingenious explanations can be properly appraised, for they have not yet been separated. The separation and the separate appraisals will be the subject of this paper.
For a more recent (and more generally positive) appraisal, see Charles Yang, "Who's afraid of George Kingsley Zipf? Or: Do children and chimps have language?", Significance 2013.
As background for the use of "philology" in Zipf's subtitle, a Google Books Ngrams plot shows that in 1935 "philology" had fallen from its peak in 1875, but "linguistics" was just starting its rise:
There's much more to say, about methodology as well as terminology and personalities, but that's enough for now.