Books on statistics for linguistics

[Chris Butler]

Shanley Allen has asked me to post to the list some references to general books on statistics for linguistics. Here is an annotated selection, which I hope will be useful. Other list members will no doubt be able to suggest other books which they have found helpful.

Chris Butler



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Butler, C. S. (1985) Statistics in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 

[Covers basic techniques only; explains the maths on the way; many examples. Last chapter hopelessly out of date 25 years on! Now out of print, but available via the internet at  http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/llas/statistics-in-linguistics/bkindex.shtml]

 

Hatch, E. & A. Lazaraton (1991) The Research Manual: Design and Statistics for Applied Linguistics. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. 

[Fairly high level treatment, with many useful examples.]

 

Johnson, K. (2008) Quantitative Methods in Linguistics. Oxford, Malden MA (USA) and Carlton, Victoria (Australia): Blackwell Publishing.

[A fairly advanced treatment of a wide range of statistical techniques for the study of language, with statistical routines in the programming environment 'R'. Deals with the basics rather quickly, but also covers regression methods in detail.

 

Oakes, M. P. (1998) Statistics for Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh Textbooks in Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

[One chapter covers basic techniques rather briefly. Good discussion of multivariate methods. Also deals with other statistically-related procedures relevant to corpus linguistics, such as word tagging.]

 

Rasinger, S. M. (2008) Quantitative Research in Linguistics: An Introduction. London: Continuum.

[An introduction to quantitative data and its analysis, including basic statistical techniques.]

 

Woods, A., P. Fletcher & A. Hughes (1986) Statistics in Language Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

[A more comprehensive treatment than Butler 1985, and at a considerably higher level, so correspondingly more difficult to read. Covers multivariate techniques, regression, etc in some detail. Very good examples.]