An Introduction to Statistics in Linguistics (1): A Statistical Point of View and Linguistics

Abstract

Generally, data can be categorized as qualitative and quantitative, but besides that, data can be analyzed from a quantitative viewpoint or a non-quantitative viewpoint. This paper summarizes the analysis of Japanese language studies from a quantitative point of view, referring to various perspectives, including usage examples, corpus, and multi-person questionnaire-based surveys. It also points out that quantitative analysis is a major analytical method in Japanese language studies that is commonly used in a variety of other academic fields. This paper also explains statistics by breaking it down into descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and exploratory statistics. Furthermore, it defines the differences between statistical studies and quantitative studies. While statistical studies require theoretical and fundamental methods of data analysis, quantitative studies use applied and practical data analysis methods. When conducting quantitative linguistic research, great emphasis is placed on the investigation. Therefore, the importance of investigation planning and interpretation of the outcomes when conducting an investigation is also discussed in this paper.