Quantitative Linguistik
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In dem Beitrag wird der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern die Frequenz eines Wortes mit seiner orthographischen Richtigschreibung zusammenhangt. Werden häufige Wörter öfter und früher richtig geschrieben? Und welche Rolle spielt dabei die orthographische Regelhaftigkeit der Wortstrukturen? Unter Zuhilfenahme maschineller Analyseverfahren aus der Großstudie "Automatisierte Rechtschreibdiagnostik" (Fay/Berkling/Stüker 2012) werden diesbezuglich über 1000 Schülertexte von Klasse 2 bis 8 untersucht. Im Ergebnis werden zum einen einige Annahmen, die bislang vor allem auf Erfahrungswerten aus der sprachdidaktischen Arbeit fußten, empirisch bestätigt, zum anderen werden sie hinsichtlich spezifischer Rechtschreibphänomene differenziert und erweitert.
Sound units play a pivotal role in cognitive models of auditory comprehension. The general consensus is that during perception listeners break down speech into auditory words and subsequently phones. Indeed, cognitive speech recognition is typically taken to be computationally intractable without phones. Here we present a computational model trained on 20 hours of conversational speech that recognizes word meanings within the range of human performance (model 25%, native speakers 20–44%), without making use of phone or word form representations. Our model also generates successfully predictions about the speed and accuracy of human auditory comprehension. At the heart of the model is a ‘wide’ yet sparse two-layer artificial neural network with some hundred thousand input units representing summaries of changes in acoustic frequency bands, and proxies for lexical meanings as output units. We believe that our model holds promise for resolving longstanding theoretical problems surrounding the notion of the phone in linguistic theory.
Die ansprechende und geeignete Visualisierung linguistischer Daten gewinnt analog zum steigenden Einfluss quantitativer Methoden in der Linguistik immer mehr an Bedeutung. R ist eine flexible und freie Entwicklungsumgebung zur Umsetzung von statistischen Analysen, die zahlreiche Optionen zur Datenvisualisierung bereithält und sehr gut für große Datensätze geeignet ist. Statistische Analysen und Visualisierungen von Daten werden auf diese Weise in einer Umgebung verzahnt. Durch die zahlreichen Zusatzpakete stehen auch weiterhin zeitgemäße Methoden zur Verfügung, um (linguistische) Daten zu analysieren und darzustellen.
Der Beitrag vermittelt einen stark anwendungsorientierten Einstieg in das Programm und legt mithilfe von vielen praktischen Übungen und Anwendungsbeispielen die Grundlagen für ein eigenständiges Weiterentwickeln der individuellen Fähigkeiten im Umgang mit der Software. Neben einer kurzen, eher theoretisch angelegten Einleitung zu explorativen und explanatorischen Visualisierungsstrategien von Daten werden verschiedene Pakete vorgestellt, die für die Visualisierung in R benutzt werden können.
Languages 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.
Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size
(2020)
Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because 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 many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 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.
Studying Lexical Dynamics and Language Change via Generalized Entropies: The Problem of Sample Size
(2019)
Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because 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 many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 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.
The article investigates the conditions under which the w-relativizer was appears instead of the d-relativzer das in German relative clauses. Building on Wiese 2013, we argue that was constitutes the elsewhere case that applies when identification with the antecedent cannot be established by syntactic means via upward agreement with respect to phi-features. Corpuslinguistic results point to the conclusion that this is the case whenever there is no lexical nominal in the antecedent that, following Geach 1962 and Baker 2003, supplies a criterion of identity needed to establish sameness of reference between the antecedent and the relativizer.