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19 - Elementary statistical testing with R

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

By
Stefan Th. Gries
Edited by
Manfred Krug  and
Julia Schlüter
Stefan Th. Gries
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Manfred Krug
Affiliation:
Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
Julia Schlüter
Affiliation:
Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
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Summary

Introduction

In Brian Joseph's final editorial as the editor of what many see as the flagship journal of the discipline, Language, he commented on recent developments in the field. One of the recent developments he has seen happening is the following:

Linguistics has always had a numerical and mathematical side . . . but the use of quantitative methods, and, relatedly, formalizations and modeling, seems to be ever on the increase; rare is the paper that does not report on some statistical analysis of relevant data or offer some model of the problem at hand.

(Joseph 2008: 687)

For several reasons, this appears to be a development for the better. First, it situates the field of linguistics more firmly in the domains of social sciences and cognitive science to which, I think, it belongs. Other fields in the social sciences and in cognitive science – psychology, sociology, computer science, to name but a few – have long recognized the power of quantitative methods for their respective fields of study, and since linguists deal with phenomena just as multifactorial and interrelated as scholars in these disciplines, it was time we also began to use the tools that have been so useful in neighboring disciplines.

Second, the quantitative study of phenomena affords us with a higher degree of comparability, objectivity, and replicability. Consider the following slightly edited statement:

there is at best a very slight increase in the first four decades, then a small but clear increase in the next three decades, followed by a very large increase in the last two decades (this chapter, cf. below Section 2.4).

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Research Methods in Language Variation and Change , pp. 361 - 381
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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References

Baayen, R. Harald 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawley, Michael 2012. The R book. 2nd edn. Chichester: John Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, John 2005. ‘The R commander: a basic statistics graphical user interface to R’, Journal of Statistical Software 14(9): 1–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2009. Quantitative corpus linguistics with R: a practical introduction. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2013. Statistics for linguistics with R: a practical introduction. 2nd edn. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hilpert, Martin and Gries, Stefan Th. 2009. ‘Assessing frequency changes in multi-stage diachronic corpora: applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition’, Literary and Linguistic Computing 34(4): 385–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Keith 2008. Quantitative methods in linguistics. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sheskin, David 2011. Handbook of parametric and non-parametric statistical procedures. 5th edn. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall.Google Scholar
Spector, Phil 2008. Data manipulation with R. Berlin and New York: Springer.Google Scholar

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  • Elementary statistical testing with R
    • By Stefan Th. Gries, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
  • Edited by Manfred Krug, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany, Julia Schlüter, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
  • Book: Research Methods in Language Variation and Change
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511792519.024
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  • Elementary statistical testing with R
    • By Stefan Th. Gries, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
  • Edited by Manfred Krug, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany, Julia Schlüter, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
  • Book: Research Methods in Language Variation and Change
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511792519.024
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Elementary statistical testing with R
    • By Stefan Th. Gries, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
  • Edited by Manfred Krug, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany, Julia Schlüter, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
  • Book: Research Methods in Language Variation and Change
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511792519.024
Available formats
×