http://linguistlist.org Latest Disc Issues en-us Copyright 2008 The LINGUIST List linguist@linguistlist.org linguist@linguistlist.org http://backend.userland.com/rss Thu, 25 Feb 2016 21:30:01 EST 60 http://linguistlist.org/images/lllogo-large.png http://linguistlist.org http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-938.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-938.html Esad Halilović <esadhalilovic@gmx.com> Mon, 22 Feb 2016 12:22:44 EST
Please help me with these three research questions:

1. Has anyone ever written on any attempts at setting some sort of loose percentage boundaries at which certain linguistic changes enter the standard norm? Please do not get me wrong, I am not saying that there should be any, I am just researching any possible attempts at it. Other factors do wield a strong influence, but in general I was wondering has anyone ever tried to observe at which boundaries does a let's say new synonym become a valid counterpart. Is it when it is used in 10-20%, 20-30% or 30-40% of occurrences. An awfully generalized statement but still. Or perhaps something along the lines of how rare of an occurrence does a lexeme have to have to be rendered obsolete. Or anything similar. Please let me know if you know of anyone who could help me with this question.
2. Does anyone know of any other available corpus of variants of English which have fewer speakers, such as Australian, Canadian, Irish, Singapore etc. except for Glowbe?
3. Has anyone ever dealt with what happens when variants of a given language (or very similar languages) are not always clearly discernible (in shorter texts) or do not coincide with geographical or state borders? Sometimes it feels more as if one is researching an area more than a language.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,
Esad Halilović



Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                            Discipline of Linguistics
                            Language Documentation
                            Lexicography
                            Text/Corpus Linguistics




[Linguist List announcement 27.938]]]> http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-937.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-937.html Bettina Eiber <bettina.eiber@googlemail.com> Mon, 22 Feb 2016 12:21:40 EST
I am working on a corpus containing Wikipedia articles and articles from printed encyclopedias. I would like to study differences in style between Computer Mediated Discourse and written discourse. My corpus contains articles from 4 disciplines and it is thematically comparable because I always chose the same lemma.

I also calculated relative frequencies and now I ask myself how to find out the most typical words for each subcorpus (Wikipedia vs. printed encyclopedias). For this purpose I ask the question if statistical methods like significance testing could help here. I read about LL-test, chi square and also non-parametric tests.

Now: Which test should I apply for my research question or should I rely on other measures?

Thank you for your answers,
Bettina Eiber



Linguistic Field(s): Text/Corpus Linguistics




[Linguist List announcement 27.937]]]>