[Corpora-List] Which Statistical Test is Suitable

[chris brew]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 12:06 PM, Yorick Wilks <Y.Wilks at dcs.shef.ac.uk>wrote:

> Im not sure if this contributes anything to the discussion or not, but
> there is clearly an obvious distinction between
> ,on the one hand, acceptable variants in spelling, where the balance shifts
> over time, e.g. judgement/judgment (especially as that one is not a US/UK
> distinction, a quite separate issue), and, on the other, misspellings among
> which there is huge variation, even for seemingly similar "errors".
> For example if you compare on Google ceiling/cieling with piece/peice
> (where, importantly, the wrong versions are non-words in both cases) and
> where both seem to be "e/i reversal" you find that one error is a hundred
> times commoner than the other. Im not sure what that tells us about
> anything---such as mastery of explicit rules and their exceptions or not, as
> the case may be.
> Yorick Wilks
>

All comments of the form "It's a bit more complicated than that ..." have a
good chance of being true here.
It's quite clear that the full story involves a massive interplay between
 phonology (I saw someone today using "Pop" as a spelling for "Bob"),
orthography (perhaps "Pop" was an orthography mistake after all), technology
(are you writing with a qwerty keyboard, or by hand, or using a clever inout
system for like the usual ones for Japanese) cognitive representations,  de
facto social norms (e.g. what level of spelling variability you can actually
get away with writing in a formal business letter before it starts looking
bad), de jure social norms (e.g. the new German spelling system and
everything that comes out of national language academies), community
identification, level of stubborn insistence on UK/US norms, fatigue, finger
strength, education level, mother-language interference. It's not possible
to do the experiments that would be needed. I would love to know what would
have happened to French if the Academie Francaise had not existed, or to
English if there had been an influential central authority. We can't know.

That statistical model is going to be tricky to make.



>
>
> On 16 Jul 2011, at 15:51, Angus Grieve-Smith wrote:
>
> > On 7/14/2011 3:36 AM, True Friend wrote:
> >> As you can see the frequencies are closely related, my aim was to
> summarize the group behaviour. The point here is to show the general
> public's usage, that despite of rules available, people are confused in
> spelling of these words.
> >
> >    It's rarely just a case of "people are confused."  Croft (2000) talks
> about cases where a single community uses two different variants.  He is
> referring primarily to morphological or syntactic variation, but I think
> this also applies to spelling variation.  There are three possible outcomes:
> >
> > 1. The alternative forms are reassigned to different functions so that
> they are no longer in competition.
> > 2. The variation is reinterpreted as corresponding to a division of the
> community.
> > 3. The community gradually shifts towards the use of one variant or the
> other.
> >
> >    It's still not clear to me what statement you're trying to make, who
> you're trying to convince, and what your ultimate political goal is.  Whose
> usage do they really care about?
> >
> > Croft, William. 2000. Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary
> Approach. London: Longman.
> >
> > --
> >                               -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
> >                               grvsmth at panix.com
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
> > Corpora mailing list
> > Corpora at uib.no
> > http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>



-- 
Chris Brew, Ohio State University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20110716/9c4d301a/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora