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In trying to give an account of the statistical properties of language, one is faced with the problem of having to find the common thread which would show the many and multifarious forms of language statistic- embodied in scattered papers written by linguists, philosophers, mathe maticians, engineers, each using his own professional idiom - as belong ing to one great whole: quantitative linguistics. This means that the investigator has to find the system of this branch of science which would enable him to arrange the vast material in an orderly fashion, and present it as an organic whole. Such a system is conceived in this book, as comprising the following disciplines as the four main branches of literary statistics: Statistical Linguistics, Stylostatistics, Optimal Systems of Language Structure, and Linguistic Duality (Parts I-IV). The Introduction is meant to define the position of the book with regard to both, linguistics and statistics.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 1.1. Historical sketch.- 1.2. Language as a mass phenomenon - 'Quantity Survey' of language.- 1.3. Chance as a factor of linguistic expression and language structure.- 1.4. Structuralism and statistical linguistics.- 1.5. Language as choice and chance.- 1.6. De Saussure's 'Principe Linéaire' and geometrical duality.- 1.7. Literary statistics, a new branch of applied statistics.- 1.8. Plan of the book.- I. Language as Chance I - Statistical Linguistics.- 2. Stability of Linguistic Distributions.- 3. Explanation of Stability of Linguistic Distributions.- 4. Application of the Theory of Stability of Alphabetic Distributions to a Problem of Language Mixture.- II. Language as Choice I - Stylostatistics.- 5. Style as a Statistical Concept.- 6. Word Count Mathematics.- 7. Style Relationships - Bi-Variate Stylostatistics.- 8. A Guide to Stylo-statistical Investigations.- III. Language as Chance II - Optimal Systems of Language Structure.- III.(A) Combinatorics on the Phonemic (Alphabetic) Level.- 9. The Combinatorial Structure of Words.- 10. Optimality of the Word-Length Distribution.- 11. Combinatorics applied to Problems of Classical Poetry.- III.(B) Combinatorics on the Lexicon Level.- 12. Random Partitioning of Vocabulary - Vocabulary Connectivity.- 13. The Generalised Random Partitioning Function and Stylostatistics.- 14. The "New Statistics" on the Vocabulary Level.- III.(C) Information Theory.- 15. Principles of Information Theory.- 16. Information-Theoretical Analysis as a Tool of Linguistic Research.- 17. Language Translations as Bi-Variate Distributions of Coding Symbols.- IV. Language as Choice II - Linguistic Duality.- 18. The Four-fold Root of Linguistic Duality.- 19. Duality as Correcting Factor - Inadequacy ofTruly SeiologicCodes.- 20. Duality and Language Translation.- V. Statistics for the Language Seminary.- V.(A) Statistics of Language in the Mass.- 21. Descriptive Statistics.- 22. Statistical Inference - The Binomial Case.- 23. Statistical Inference in the Case of Multiple Classification of Events.- 24. Theory of Correlation.- V. (B) Statistics of Language in the Line.- 25. The Dimension of Time in Language Statistics.- 26. Linguistic Duality and 'Parity'.- Appendix - A Survey of Past and Present-day Statistical Linguistics.- Author Index.
