De kwantitatieve diepgang van taalvariatie-onderzoek

Samenvatting

The study of linguistic variation has shifted towards quantitative analysis over the last decades, as can be seen in both sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. What is the added value of a quantitative analysis? Its value is shown on the basis of some concrete research examples where a so-called linguistic variable is analysed by including internal (linguistic) and external (non-linguistic) variables or factors. The basic statistical technique is chi square analysis. The more advanced applications involve logistic regression analysis. The increasing availability of larger language corpora enhances the quantitative development and implies a further extension by investigating complex syntactic variation patterns.