Out now… Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research (Routledge)

I am very pleased to announce that my new book, Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research, is now available from Routledge.

Drawing on more than ten years of research, and containing a large quantity of material never published before, the book is written for corpus linguistics researchers of all kinds, from students of corpus linguistics wishing to apply statistical analysis for the first time, to seasoned researchers who find themselves asking deeper questions about their data.

The ‘new approach’ of the title builds on my thesis that human beings find statistical reasoning difficult because we do not experience the world stochastically, as many observed events superimposed, but serially, as events recalled one-by-one. We cannot easily visualise (and thus conceptualise) the distribution of many independent observations, never mind (a common requirement) the distribution of the mean of many samples! Consequently our intuitions are frequently wrong. So if you have been confused by conventional statistics textbooks that take this type of reasoning for granted, you are not alone.

This focus on statistical fundamentals is integrated within a linguistic-theory-first perspective on working with corpus data, an approach that used to be called ‘the Survey Methodology’ in Corpus Linguistics, but which I prefer to think of as the scientific research paradigm as applied to language corpora.

If you have found my blog useful, I can confidently say you will benefit from this book!

• Order and more information (Routledge)
• Resources for Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research (UCL)