Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research : A New Approach

Traditional approaches focused on significance tests have often been difficult for linguistics researchers to visualise. Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research: A New Approach breaks significance tests down for researchers in corpus linguistics and linguistic analysis, promoting a visual approach to understanding the performance of tests with real data, and demonstrating how to derive new confidence intervals and tests.

This fully revised second edition includes a brand-new chapter describing a novel extended ‘MOVER’ method to derive accurate confidence intervals for numerous properties. With sample datasets and easy-to-read visuals, this book focuses on practical issues, such as how to

• pose meaningful research questions in terms of choice and constraint
• employ confidence intervals correctly (including in graph plots)
• select a significance test (and interpret its results)
• construct confidence intervals for functions of independent proportions
• measure the size of the effect of one variable on another or the similaritybetween two distributions; and
• evaluate whether the results of two experiments significantly differ

Appropriate for anyone from the student just beginning their career to the seasoned researcher, this book is both a practical overview and valuable resource.

A website with downloadable resources for the calculations in this book is published at https://corplingstats.wordpress.com/siclr

Sean Wallis is Principal Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Survey of English Usage at UCL.