Abstract
Empirical linguistics has always gravitated towards quantification. With the advent of electronic corpora—large, searchable sets of natural language data, quantification has become part and parcel of linguistic studies. In the past few decades in particular, we have witnessed a “quantitative turn” in various schools of linguistics (cf. Janda, 2013 for cognitive linguistics) and in the digital humanities which was further accelerated by the advent of text corpora. This volume aims to showcase a variety of recent quantitative approaches that “tame the corpus”; it shows how language corpora can be used for research questions of interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social scientists. It simultaneously fills a lacuna in mainstream English-based quantitative linguistic studies by demonstrating that quantitative methods applied on inflectional language may reveal novel phenomena.
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Notes
- 1.
The volume was inspired by the Workshop on Quantitative Text Analysis for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which the editors organized at Brown University on April 8 and 9, 2016.
- 2.
Superficial Internet search often leads one to have such an impression, cf. https://www.orau.gov/cdcynergy/soc2web/content/phase05/phase05_step03_deeper_qualitative_and_quantitative.htm and https://keydifferences.com/difference-between-qualitative-and-quantitative-research.html#ComparisonChart. Accessed 25 May 2018.
- 3.
Even a singular appearance represents quantity (=1) and the difference between a single or no occurrence may result in ascribing an important property to the phenomenon under examination or not. But usually, even in qualitative studies, multiple examples demonstrating a hypothesis are better than one.
- 4.
Unlike many quantitative studies, where the amount of reduction is sometimes explicitly acknowledged. Johnson states that in fact any (statistical) inference about the data is guessing; what quantitative methods can help us with is to quantify how reliable our guesses are (2008, p. 3).
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Acknowledgments
The publication of this volume was made possible by support from grant Progres Q08 Czech National Corpus implemented at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University and the Humanities Research Grant from Brown University. Special thanks goes to Mathew Amboy and Faith Su from Springer who saw through the entire publication process and Marek Nekula for thoughtful and helpful comments on the manuscripts. The editors would also like to thank Andrew Malcovsky for copyediting work. Last but not least, many thanks to Lída Cvrčková Porkertová and Vlastimil Fidler for their support and patience.
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Cvrček, V., Fidler, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Fidler, M., Cvrček, V. (eds) Taming the Corpus. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98017-1_1
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