Statistical Methods in Language and Linguistic Research

The aim of this book is try to illustrate with numerous examples how quantitative methods can most fruitfully contribute to linguistic analysis and research. In addition, it does not intend to offer an exhaustive presentation of all statistical techniques available to linguistics, but to demonstrate the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. Among the linguistic community, statistical methods or more generally quantitative techniques are mostly ignored or avoided because of the lack of training, fear and dislike too. The reasons: (1) these techniques are just not related to linguistics, philology or humanities; statistics falls into the province of sciences, mathematics and the like; and/or (2) there is a feeling that these methods may destroy the "magic" in literary text. This book shows how quantitative methods and statistical techniques can supplement qualitative analyses of language. It attempts to present some mathematical and statistical properties of natural languages, and introduces some of the quantitative methods which are of the most value in working empirically with texts and corpora, illustrating the various issues with numerous examples and moving from the most basic descriptive techniques to decision-taking techniques and to more sophisticated multivariate statistical language models.