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We investigate the optional omission of the infinitival marker in a Swedish future tense construction. During the last two decades the frequency of omission has been rapidly increasing, and this process has received considerable attention in the literature. We test whether the knowledge which has been accumulated can yield accurate predictions of language variation and change. We extracted all occurrences of the construction from a very large collection of corpora. The dataset was automatically annotated with language-internal predictors which have previously been shown or hypothesized to affect the variation. We trained several models in order to make two kinds of predictions: whether the marker will be omitted in a specific utterance and how large the proportion of omissions will be for a given time period. For most of the approaches we tried, we were not able to achieve a better-than-baseline performance. The only exception was predicting the proportion of omissions using autoregressive integrated moving average models for one-step-ahead forecast, and in this case time was the only predictor that mattered. Our data suggest that most of the language-internal predictors do have some effect on the variation, but the effect is not strong enough to yield reliable predictions.
In this paper, we present the concept and the results of two studies addressing (potential) users of monolingual German online dictionaries, such as www.elexiko.de. Drawing on the example of elexiko, the aim of those studies was to collect empirical data on possible extensions of the content of monolingual online dictionaries, e.g. the search function, to evaluate how users comprehend the terminology of the user interface, to find out which types of information are expected to be included in each specific lexicographic module and to investigate general questions regarding the function and reception of examples illustrating the use of a word. The design and distribution of the surveys is comparable to the studies described in the chapters 5-8 of this volume. We also explain, how the data obtained in our studies were used for further improvement of the elexiko-dictionary.
Der Beitrag stellt die Ergebnisse einer Onlinebenutzungsstudie zur Funktion und Rezeption von Belegen im einsprachigen deutschen Onlinewörterbuch elexiko vor. Diese werden vor dem Hintergrund allgemeiner metalexikographischer und konzeptioneller Überlegungen interpretiert, ein Ausblick führt zu weiteren relevanten Fragestellungen.
In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/ cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005. 1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 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.
Classical null hypothesis significance tests are not appropriate in corpus linguistics, because the randomness assumption underlying these testing procedures is not fulfilled. Nevertheless, there are numerous scenarios where it would be beneficial to have some kind of test in order to judge the relevance of a result (e.g. a difference between two corpora) by answering the question whether the attribute of interest is pronounced enough to warrant the conclusion that it is substantial and not due to chance. In this paper, I outline such a test.
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed.
This chapter summarizes the typical steps of an empirical investigation. Every step is illustrated using examples from our research project into online dictionary use or other relevant studies. This chapter does not claim to contain anything new, but presents a brief guideline for lexicographical researchers who are interested in conducting their own empirical research.
This 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.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Language Evolution, Kauhanen, Einhaus & Walkden (KEW) challenge the results presented in one of my papers (Koplenig, Royal Society Open Science, 6, 181274 (2019)), 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.
In a previous study, Aceves and Evans present a large-scale quantitative information-theoretic analysis of parallel corpus data in ~1,000 languages to show that there are apparently strong associations between the way languages encode information into words and patterns of communication, e.g. the configuration of semantic information. During the peer review process, one reviewer raised the question of the extent to which the presented results depend on different corpus sizes (see the Peer Review File). This is a very important question given that most, if not all, of the quantities associated with word frequency distributions vary systematically with corpus size. While Aceves and Evans claim that corpus size does not affect the results presented, I challenge this view by presenting reanalyses of the data that clearly suggest that it does.