Reinhard Köhler - Böcker

QUALICO has been held for the first time as an international conference to demonstrate the state of the art in quantitative linguistics. This domain of language study and research is gaining considerable interest due to recent advances in linguistic modelling, particularly in computational linguistics, cognitive science, and developments in mathematics such as modern systems theory. Progress in hardware and software technology, together with ease of access to data and numerical processing, has provided new means of empirical data acquisition and the application of mathematical models of adequate complexity. This volume contains the papers read at QUALICO 91, and provides a representative overview of the state of the art in quantitative linguistic research.

Over the past two decades, statistical and other quantitative concepts, models and methods have been increasingly gaining importance and interest in all areas of linguistics and text analysis, as well as in a number of neighboring disciplines and areas of application. The term "quantitative linguistics" comprises all scientific and technical approaches which use such terms and methods in the analysis of or work with language(s), texts and other related subjects.The 71 articles in this handbook, written by internationally-recognized experts, offer a broad, up-to-date overview of the scientific-theoretical principles, the history, the diversity of the subject areas studied, the methods and models used, the results obtained thus far and their applications.The articles are divided up into thirteen chapters: the first chapter includes contributions on the basic principles and the history of the field, nine additional chapters are dedicated to individual descriptions of the levels of linguistic research (from phonology to pragmatics) as well as typological, diachronic and geolinguistic questions. The next two chapters include a description of important models, hypotheses and principles; selected areas of application; and references to neighboring disciplines. The last portion of the handbook is an informative contribution, with information about publication forums, bibliographies, major projects, Internet links, etc. This handbook is useful not only for researchers, teachers and students of all branches of linguistics and the philologies, but also for scientists in neighboring fields, whose theoretical and empirical research touches on linguistic questions (for instance, psychology and sociology), or for those who want to make use of the proven methods or results from quantitative linguistics in their own research.

The collection contains more than 60 original papers and reflects current research topics in linguistics and text analysis. Most of the papers present recent results of empirical quantitative investigations; others focus on methodological issues, whereas some of them are of a more theoretical, systems-theoretical/semiotic character. Finally, a number of contributions form typical integrative deductive-inductive studies. The volume is a valuable source of information about the current state-of-the-art in quantitative linguistic research, presented by renowned representatives of the field.

This is the first book which brings together the fields of theoretical and empirical studies in syntax on the one hand and the methodology of quantitative linguistics on the other hand. The author provides the theoretical background for this enterprise on the basis of the philosophy of science and of linguistic considerations including a discussion of Chomsky’s attitude against the application of statistical methods to syntactic phenomena. He gives a short introduction into the aims and methods of the quantitative approach to linguistics in general and to syntax in particular. The following chapters inform the reader about the measurement of syntactic properties, possibilities to acquire empirical data from syntactically annotated text corpora and the most common mathematical models and methods for the analysis of syntactic and syntagmatic material. Then, a number of prominent approaches and hypotheses about interrelations between properties of syntactic constructions are presented and evaluated on material from various languages and text kinds. Finally, the theory of synergetic linguistics and its application to syntax is introduced including the integration of such famous hypotheses as Yngve’s depth hypothesis and Hawkins’s "Early immediate constituent" principle.The book concludes with a number of perspectives with respect to follow-up studies and extensions to the presented models with interfaces to neighbouring disciplines.

The present volume presents objective methods to detect and analyse various forms of repetitions. Repetition of textual elements is more than a superficial phenomenon. It may even be considered as constitutive for units and relations in a text: on a primary level when no other way exists to establish a unit – as in a musical composition (a motif can be recognised as such only after at least one repetition) – and on a secondary, artistic level, where repetition is a consequence of the transfer of the equivalence principle from the paradigmatic axis to the syntagmatic one as showed by R. Jakobson.The analysis of repetitive elements and structures in texts with objective mathematical means can serve several practical and theoretical purposes, among them:Characterisation of texts by means of parameters (measures, indicators) as taken from established mathematical statistics or specifically constructed ones in individual cases.Comparison of texts on the basis of their quantitative characteristics and classification of the texts by the results.Research for the laws of text, which control the mechanisms connected to text creation. As a remote aim, the construction of a theory of text consisting of a system of text laws. The final attempt of every possible quantitative text analysis is the construction of a text theory. The book illustrates this on examples of such laws and corresponding empirical tests.

Quantitative linguistic research reveals fascinating patterns in contemporary and historical linguistic data. The book offers insights from a broad range of languages, including Japanese, Slovene and Catalan. The reader is convinced that statistic empirical analysis – and increasingly also machine learning and big data – should be an essential part of any serious linguistic enquiry.

The significance of natural language texts as the prime information structure for the management and dissemination of knowledge is - as the rise of the web shows - still increasing.

The significance of natural language texts as the prime information structure for the management and dissemination of knowledge is - as the rise of the web shows - still increasing. Making relevant texts available in different contexts is of primary importance for efficient task completion in academic and industrial settings. Meeting this demand requires automatic form and content based processing of texts, which enables to reconstruct or even to explore the dynamic relationship of language system, text event and context type. The rise of new application areas, disciplines and methods (e.g. text and web mining) testify to the importance of this task. Moreover, the growing area of new media demands the further development of methods of text analysis with respect to their computational linguistic, information theoretical, and mathematical underpinning. This book contributes to this task. It collects contributions of authors from a multidisciplinary area who focus on the topic of automatic text analysis from several (i.e. linguistic, mathematical, and information theoretical) perspectives. It describes methodological as well as methodical foundations and collects approaches in the field of text and corpus linguistics. In this sense, it contributes to the computational linguistic and information theoretical grounding of automatic text analysis.