14,774 research outputs found
Replication Data for: Against statistical significance testing in corpus linguistics
No full textIn the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing
Analyzing lexical change in diachronic corpora
No full textThis thesis consists of the following three papers that all have been published in international peer-reviewed journals:
Chapter 3: Koplenig, Alexander (2015c). The Impact of Lacking Metadata for the Measurement of Cultural and Linguistic Change Using the Google Ngram Data Sets—Reconstructing the Composition of the German Corpus in Times of WWII. Published in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [doi:10.1093/llc/fqv037]
Chapter 4: Koplenig, Alexander (2015b). Why the quantitative analysis of dia-chronic corpora that does not consider the temporal aspect of time-series can lead to wrong conclusions. Published in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [doi:10.1093/llc/fqv030]
Chapter 5: Koplenig, Alexander (2015a). Using the parameters of the Zipf–Mandelbrot law to measure diachronic lexical, syntactical and stylistic changes – a large-scale corpus analysis. Published in: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. [doi:10.1515/cllt-2014-0049]
Chapter 1 introduces the topic by describing and discussing several basic concepts relevant to the statistical analysis of corpus linguistic data. Chapter 2 presents a method to analyze diachronic corpus data and a summary of the three publications. Chapters 3 to 5 each represent one of the three publications. All papers are printed in this thesis with the permission of the publishers
Replication Data for: Studying lexical dynamics and language change via generalized entropies – the problem of sample size
No full textRecently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting since textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e. there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g. function words expressing grammatical relationships) and very many word types with a very low frequency (e.g. content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Varying α makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine “Der Spiegel” (consisting of approximately 365k articles and 237M words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e. text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages
Replication Data for: Studying lexical dynamics and language change via generalized entropies – the problem of sample size
No full textRecently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting since textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e. there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g. function words expressing grammatical relationships) and very many word types with a very low frequency (e.g. content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Varying α makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine “Der Spiegel” (consisting of approximately 365k articles and 237M words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e. text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages
Replication Data for: The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure – large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort
No full textLanguages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that – despite differences in the way information is expressed – there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways
Replication Data for: The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure – large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort
No full textLanguages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that – despite differences in the way information is expressed – there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways
Understanding how users evaluate innovative features of online dictionaries – an experimental approach
No full textCompared with printed dictionaries, online dictionaries provide a number of unique possibilities for the presentation and processing of lexicographical information. However, in Müller-Spitzer/Koplenig/Töpel (2011) we show that – on average - users tend to rate the special characteristics of online dictionaries (e.g. multimedia, adaptability) as (partly) unimportant. This result conflicts somewhat with the lexicographical request both for the development of a user-adaptive interface and the incorporation of multimedia elements. This contribution seeks to explain this discrepancy, by arguing that when potential users are fully informed about the benefits of possible innovative features of online dictionaries, they will come to judge these characteristics to be more useful than users that do not have this kind of information. This argument is supported by empirical evidence presented in this paper
Still no evidence for an effect of the proportion of non-native speakers on language complexity -- A response to Kauhanen, Einhaus & Walkden (2023)
No full textIn a recent paper published in the Journal of Language Evolution, Kauhanen, Einhaus & Walkden (https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzad005, KEW) challenge the results presented in one of my papers (Koplenig, Royal Society Open Science, 6, 181274 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274), in which I tried to show through a series of statistical analyses that large numbers of L2 (second language) speakers do not seem to affect the (grammatical or statistical) complexity of a language. To this end, I focus on the way in which the Ethnologue assesses language status: a language is characterised as vehicular if, in addition to being used by L1 (first language) speakers, it should also have a significant number of L2 users. KEW criticise both the use of vehicularity as a (binary) indicator of whether a language has a significant number of L2 users and the idea of imputing a zero proportion of L2 speakers to non-vehicular languages whenever a direct estimate of that proportion is unavailable. While I recognise the importance of post-publication commentary on published research, I show in this rejoinder that both points of criticism are explicitly mentioned and analysed in my paper. In addition, I also comment on other points raised by KEW and demonstrate that both alternative analyses offered by KEW do not stand up to closer scrutiny.v6 - fixed a typ
Douglas Alexander Stewart, poet, author and playwright
No full textDouglas Alexander Stewart, poet, author and playwrigh
Author inscription in William Hazlitt, essayist and critic; selections from his writings, with a memoir, biographical and critical by Alexander Ireland
No full textAuthor's gift inscription, "To W. C. Hazlitt Esq with kind regards, from Alexr Ireland," with tipped-in review of the book.ASU Library edition has inscription from Ireland to Hazlitt [a child of William Hazlitt?].
Hazlitt , William, 1778-1830.
Ireland, Alexander, 1810-1894
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