WiSe18/19: Statistics

Whereas traditional linguistic work relied on introspective judgments of linguists or on manually (and arbitrarily) collected data, modern electronic repositories provide a very different type of access to languages: Corpus Linguistics is concerned with the great variety of text (and speech) available on the Internet or in other electronic resources, which are collected in corpora for analysis. In this course we will discuss the nature of corpora, their value for linguistics, and the kind of data that become available with corpora. To analyze corpus data, we will learn how to use simple statistical tools, and we will introduce important concepts that help us decide when observations we make in corpora provide significant evidence for linguistic hypotheses.