Statistical Methods in Language and Linguistic Research

Book excerpt: The linguistic community tend to regard statistical methods, or more generally quantitative techniques, with a certain amount of fear and suspicion. There is a feeling that statistics falls in the province of science and mathematics and such methods may destroy the magic of the literary text. This book seeks to make quantitative methods and statistical techniques less forbidding and show how they can contribute to linguistic analysis and research. It 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. The various issues are illustrated with helpful examples from the most basic descriptive techniques to decision-taking techniques and to more sophisticated multivariate statistical language models.