Quantitative Linguistics

Since the 1960s quantitative linguistics has undergone a great development marked especially by attempts to work systematically with language phenomena on all language levels. Besides traditional areas where significant results were already achieved before the 60s (phonology, graphemics and lexicology), quantitative linguistics has now also penetrated into morphology, syntax, stylistics, history and typology of languages and, more recently, into semantics. This book gives a comprehensive account of the various developments and applications in quantitative linguistics.After an overview of methods used in quantitative linguistics, it discusses the main areas: lexical statistics, grammatical statistics and semantics statistics, with reference to a great number of studies of different languages and language families. Chapter 4 deals with other domains (phonology, graphemics, stylistics, typology, development of languages, word-formation), Chapter 6 deals with various applications, and Chapter 7 discusses the relationship between quantitative linguistics and the computer. The volume is completed by an extensive list of references and indices of names and of subjects.