12.790, Books: Quantitative Linguistics
The LINGUIST Network
linguist at linguistlist.org
Thu Mar 22 14:58:08 UTC 2001
LINGUIST List: Vol-12-790. Thu Mar 22 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.
Subject: 12.790, Books: Quantitative Linguistics
Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
Andrew Carnie, U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
Simin Karimi, U. of Arizona
Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona
Editors (linguist at linguistlist.org):
Karen Milligan, WSU Naomi Ogasawara, EMU
Lydia Grebenyova, EMU Jody Huellmantel, WSU
James Yuells, WSU Michael Appleby, EMU
Marie Klopfenstein, WSU Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm U.
Software: John Remmers, E. Michigan U. <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
Gayathri Sriram, E. Michigan U. <gayatri at linguistlist.org>
Home Page: http://linguistlist.org/
The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.
* The LINGUIST Fund Drive for 2001 has begun! We need your help to
* continue providing the LINGUIST services. Please go to the URL
* http://linguistlist.org/funddrive.html and make a donation.
Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
==========================================================================
Links to the websites of all LINGUIST's supporting publishers are
available at the end of this issue.
=================================Directory=================================
1)
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 09:10:59 -0800
From: Kim Lewis Brown <kim at csli.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Quantitative Ling: The Significance of Word Lists by K Brett
-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 09:10:59 -0800
From: Kim Lewis Brown <kim at csli.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Quantitative Ling: The Significance of Word Lists by K Brett
Kessler, Brett (Wayne State University) ;
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORD LISTS;
paperback ISBN: 1-57586-300-6, cloth ISBN: 1-57586-299-9; 180 pages.
CSLI Publications 2001. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu
email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.
To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736 (U.S. & Canada only) or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/
(use the search feature to locate the book, then order).
Book description:
Similar words for similar concepts turn up in many widely scattered
languages. Some linguists insist that this is simply due to chance
while others claim that many if not all of the world's languages
descended from a single prehistoric language. Yet neither position in
this strident controversy has been analyzed or supported with
statistics. New computerized statistical techniques can help determine
whether or not words in different languages have an ancestral
connection. In "THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORD LISTS," flexible techniques
are explained, broken into steps, and illustrated in a manner that
provides the necessary principles to linguists with no background in
statistics.
This methodology measures the probabilistic significance of sound
correspondences between short word lists. Many rules of thumb invoked
by linguists in order to obviate chance resemblances, such as
multilateral comparison and emphasizing grammar over vocabulary, are
shown to actually decrease the power of quantitative tests. While the
procedures presented here are straightforward, the author also details
the extensive linguistic work needed to produce word lists that will
not yield nonsensical results. Examples analyze the 200 words in 8
languages that are enumerated and detailed in an appendix.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you buy one of these books, please tell the publisher or author that
you saw it on LINGUIST.
The following publishers contribute to the support of The LINGUIST List:
MAJOR SUPPORTERS
Arnold Publishers
http://www.arnoldpublishers.com
Athelstan Publications
http://www.athel.com
Blackwell Publishers
http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/
Cambridge University Press
http://www.cup.org
Cascadilla Press
http://www.cascadilla.com/
Elsevier Science Ltd.
http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/linguistics
John Benjamins
http://www.benjamins.com/
http://www.benjamins.nl/
Kluwer Academic Publishers
http://www.wkap.nl/
Lernout & Hauspie
http://www.lhsl.com
Lincom Europa
http://www.lincom-europa.com
MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books-legacy.tcl
Mouton de Gruyter
http://www.deGruyter.de/hling.html
Multilingual Matters
http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Oxford UP
http://www.oup-usa.org/
Pearson Education
http://www.pearsoneduc.com/catalog.html
Rodopi
http://www.rodopi.nl/
Springer-Verlag
http://www.springer.de
Summer Institute of Linguistics
http://www.sil.org/
OTHER SUPPORTING PUBLISHERS
Anthropological Linguistics
http://www.indiana.edu/~anthling/
Finno-Ugrian Society
http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sus/
Graduate Linguistic Students' Assoc., Umass
http://www.umass.edu/linguist/GLSA/
Kingston Press Ltd.
http://www.kingstonpress.com
Linguistic Assoc. of Finland
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/
Linguistic Society of Southern Africa (LSSA)
http://www.safest.org.za/bsp
Pacific Linguistics
http://pacling.anu.edu.au
Pacini Editore Spa
http://www.pacinieditore.it/
Virittaja Aikakauslehti
http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/kks/virittaja.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-12-790
More information about the LINGUIST
mailing list