Stefan Th. Gries: What statistical methods have to offer to linguistics

Přednáška Stefana Th. Griese na FF UK: What statistical methods have to offer to linguistics: three (differently complex) case studies of spelling, morphological change, and foreign language learning

This talk is basically a demonstration of how quantitative methods of differ-ent degrees of sophistication can inform linguistic research on various levels of linguistic analysis. I will report on three case studies. First, I will show how very simple statistics can be used to explore aspects of Spanish Internet Orthography, specifically how standard spellings are changed in online fo-rums and comments and how even speakers’ typing is influenced by semantic and articulatory characteristics of what they are typing. Second, I will address a frequent question in historical data, namely how to study morphological change given the inherent noisiness and multidimensional nature of the data using exploratory as well as hypothesis-testing statistics. Finally, I will discuss a fairly new method designed to facilitate the exploration of how speakers of a certain kind (e.g., non-native speakers or indigenized variety speakers) differ from a ‘standard/reference’ group of speakers even when human annotators of, say, learner data are not available.