Reinhard Kohler – författare

Statistische und andere quantitative Konzepte, Modelle und Verfahren gewinnen seit nunmehr zwei Jahrzehnten in allen Bereichen der Sprach- und Textwissenschaften und einer Reihe von Nachbardisziplinen sowie Anwendungsgebieten zunehmend Bedeutung und Interesse. Unter der Bezeichnung "Quantitative Linguistik" fasst man alle wissenschaftlichen und technischen Ansätze zusammen, die solche Begriffe und Methoden bei der Analyse von bzw. bei der Arbeit mit Sprache(n), Texten und verwandten Gegenständen anwenden.

Die 71 Beiträge zu diesem Handbuch, die von weltweit anerkannten Fachleuten verfasst wurden, bieten einen breiten und aktuellen Überblick über die wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlagen, die Geschichte, die Vielfalt der untersuchten Gegenstandsbereiche, über die verwendeten Methoden und Modelle und über bisher gewonnene Resultate und ihre Anwendungen.

Die Artikel sind in 13 Kapitel gegliedert: Im ersten sind Beiträge zu den Grundlagen und zur Geschichte zusammengefasst, 9 weitere Kapitel widmen sich Einzeldarstellungen zu den linguistischen Untersuchungsebenen (von der Phonologie bis zur Pragmatik) sowie zu typologischen, diachronen und geolinguistischen Fragestellungen. Eine Darstellung von wichtigen Modellen, Hypothesen und Gesetzen, von ausgewählten Anwendungsgebieten und Bezügen zu Nachbardisziplinen folgt in zwei eigenen Kapiteln. Den Abschluss bildet ein informativer Beitrag mit Informationen über Publikationsforen, Bibliographien, Großprojekten, Internetlinks etc.

Adressaten des Handbuchs sind neben Forschern, Lehrenden und Studierenden aller Zweige der Sprachwissenschaften einschließlich und der Philologien auch Wissenschaftler benachbarter Fächer, deren theoretische und empirische Forschung sprachwissenschaftliche Fragen berührt (wie Psychologie und Soziologie) bzw. die bewährte Methoden oder Resultate aus der quantitativen Linguistik für die eigenen Fragestellungen nutzbar machen wollen.

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.

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.

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.

Founding Editor: Gabriel Altmann

The series Quantitative Linguistics publishes books on all aspects of quantitative methods and models in linguistics, text analysis and related research fields. Specifically, the scope of the series covers the whole spectrum of theoretical and empirical research, ultimately striving for an exact mathematical formulation and empirical testing of hypotheses: observation and description of linguistic data, application of methods and models, discussion of methodological and epistemological issues, modelling of language and text phenomena.

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.