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Against statistical significance testing in corpus linguistics

  • Alexander Koplenig EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 3, 2017

Abstract

In the first volume of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Gries (2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2). doi:10.1515/cllt.2005.1.2.277. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cllt.2005.1.issue-2/cllt.2005.1.2.277/cllt.2005.1.2.277.xml: 285) asked whether corpus linguists should abandon null-hypothesis significance testing. In this paper, I want to revive this discussion by defending the argument that the assumptions that allow inferences about a given population – in this case about the studied languages – based on results observed in a sample – in this case a collection of naturally occurring language data – are not fulfilled. As a consequence, corpus linguists should indeed abandon null-hypothesis significance testing.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Arnulf Deppermann, Ludwig M. Eichinger, Stefan Engelberg, Martin Hilpert, Matthias Kohring, Peter Meyer, Sarah Signer, Carolin Müller-Spitzer and Sascha Wolfer for their input and feedback. All remaining errors are mine.

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Published Online: 2017-06-03
Published in Print: 2019-10-25

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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