Artikel
Laws and Theories in Quantitative Linguistics
According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a general theory of human language (cf. Best (1999) for a summary of possible theoretical positions). Due to their formal proximity to methods used in the so-called exact sciences, theoretical explanations of this kind are assumed to be superior to the supposedly descriptive-only approaches of linguistic structuralism and its successors. In this paper I shall try to argue that on close inspection such claims turn out to be highly problematic, both on linguistic and on science-theoretical grounds.
- Language
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Englisch
- Subject
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Zipfsches Gesetz
Linguistik
- Event
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Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
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Meyer, Peter
- Event
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Veröffentlichung
- (who)
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Lüdenscheid : RAM
- (when)
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2015-07-14
- URN
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urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-38679
- Last update
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06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET
Data provider
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache - Bibliothek. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Artikel
Associated
- Meyer, Peter
- Lüdenscheid : RAM
Time of origin
- 2015-07-14