LIN318: Talking Numbers

Interpretation and presentation of quantitative linguistic data

Jessamyn Schertz

2023-11-20

Introduction

These are class notes for LIN318H5: Talking Numbers, at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

During this course, you will:

• Become familiar with some of the common types of data used in quantitative linguistic analysis.
• Summarize data and report relevant descriptive statistics.
• Create effective visual representations of data.
• Assess the reliability of patterns in data and relationships between variables via statistical inference.

We will be using the software R (and RStudio) for all graphs and analysis in this course.

Additional resources

Some additional resources that you might find helpful include:

R basics

• Grolemund: Hands-on Programming with R
• Wickham, Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Grolemund: R for Data Science: This is particularly excellent for data visualization
• R for Linguists, by Eleanor Chodroff

Statistics

• Winter (2019), Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using R. Routledge. This is my primary recommendation as a supplementary textbook for this course (available as an eBook from the UofT library).
• Navarro (2018), Learning Statistics with R: This is not linguistics-specific, but I find it a very readable and entertaining introduction to fundamental statistical concepts
• Johnson (2008), Quantitative Methods in Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons (available as an eBook from the UofT library)
• Sonderegger (2023), Regression Modeling for Linguistic Data. MIT Press.

Acknowledgments

These materials are heavily based on/inspired by the materials listed above, as well as past materials and work by my colleagues Joseph Casillas, Eleonor Chodroff, Derek Denis, Yoonjung Kang, and Morgan Sonderegger.