Statistical laws in linguistics (2024)

FAQs

What is the meaning of statistical law? ›

An empirical statistical law or (in popular terminology) a law of statistics represents a type of behaviour that has been found across a number of datasets and, indeed, across a range of types of data sets.

Linguistic laws refer to statistical patterns shared across human languages. Investigation of these patterns has been extended to a range of biological systems, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems, with the number of studies increasing in recent years.

Linguists rely on statistical methods for a whole host of reasons. For one, linguistic differences are often subtle. It is hardly the case that some speaker group, some social class, some genre, etc. uses an expression that others never use.

The two fundamental laws that govern statistics are known as the law or statistical regularity and the law of inertia of large numbers. The law of statistical regularity is a law that helps us draw a sample with the assumption that any inferences drawn on the sample are applicable to the entire population.

Statistical laws are not exact. In fact, the results are true only on averages. Also, they are valid only under a certain set of assumptions. Therefore, the science of statistics is less exact than natural sciences like physics, chemistry, etc.

Statistical significance is used to provide evidence concerning the plausibility of the null hypothesis, which hypothesizes that there is nothing more than random chance at work in the data. Statistical hypothesis testing is used to determine whether the result of a data set is statistically significant.

Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) is an academic sub-discipline that uses large databases of examples of language usage equipped with tools designed by linguists called corpora to better get at the meaning of words and phrases in legal texts (statutes, constitutions, contracts, etc.).

Important subfields of linguistics include:

Morphology - the study of word structure. Syntax - the study of sentence structure. Semantics - the study of linguistic meaning.

A large part of what is meant by “statistical methods” in computational linguistics is the study of stochastic grammars of this form: grammars obtained by adding probabilities in a fairly transparent way to “algebraic” (i.e., non-probabilistic) grammars.

What is statistical learning in linguistics? ›

Statistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.

Statistics. The second most commonly used language analysis technique is statistics. It's easier to identify and comment on because it presents itself every time the author includes numbers (mostly percentages). Statistics is often used to lend credibility or evidence to the author's argument.

There are two fundamental laws of statistics namely, Law of Statistical Regularity and Law of Inertia of Large Numbers. These laws are very important when an investigator adopts sampling method in an enquiry.

Statics assumes that the bodies with which it deals are perfectly rigid. It also holds that the sum of all the forces acting on a body at rest has to be zero (i.e., the forces involved balance one another) and that there must be no tendency for the forces to turn the body about any axis.

The statistical golden rule (SGR) is the average of the two golden ratios expressions, in which the quantities a and b are, say, science units (e.g., measured in talent, time, mental strength, etc.) and art units (corresponding to the science units) employed during a statistical undertaking.

Statistical purposes mean any operation of collection and the processing of personal data necessary for statistical surveys or for the production of statistical results.

Statics assumes that the bodies with which it deals are perfectly rigid. It also holds that the sum of all the forces acting on a body at rest has to be zero (i.e., the forces involved balance one another) and that there must be no tendency for the forces to turn the body about any axis.

The mean (average) of a data set is found by adding all numbers in the data set and then dividing by the number of values in the set. The median is the middle value when a data set is ordered from least to greatest. The mode is the number that occurs most often in a data set.

For example, if we consider one math class to be a sample of the population of all math classes, then the average number of points earned by students in that one math class at the end of the term is an example of a statistic. The statistic is an estimate of a population parameter.