Laws and Theories in Quantitative Linguistics
- According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a general theory of human language (cf. Best (1999) for a summary of possible theoretical positions). Due to their formal proximity to methods used in the so-called exact sciences, theoretical explanations of this kind are assumed to be superior to the supposedly descriptive-only approaches of linguistic structuralism and its successors. In this paper I shall try to argue that on close inspection such claims turn out to be highly problematic, both on linguistic and on science-theoretical grounds.
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| Author: | Peter MeyerORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-38679 |
| ISSN: | 1617-8351 |
| Parent Title (English): | Glottometrics |
| Publisher: | RAM |
| Place of publication: | Lüdenscheid |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first Publication: | 2002 |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2015/07/14 |
| Publicationstate: | Veröffentlichungsversion |
| Reviewstate: | Verlags-Lektorat |
| Tag: | Ceteris paribus laws; Complexity theory; Emergence; Explanation; Language laws; Menzerath; Science theory; Word length; Zipf |
| GND Keyword: | Zipfsches Gesetz |
| Volume: | 2002 |
| Issue: | 5 |
| First Page: | 62 |
| Last Page: | 80 |
| DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 410 Linguistik |
| Open Access?: | ja |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Quantitative Linguistik |
| Licence (German): |  Urheberrechtlich geschützt |