5.5 JOHNSON's Quantitative methods in linguistics (2008)

Hardback: ISBN-13: 978-1-405-14424-7

Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-1-405-14425-4

Kindle edition: yes

JOHNSON’s book compared to BAAYEN (2008) is less challenging, but still represents many necessary strategies and methods of quantitative analysis. A praiseworthy idea is that the book tries to represent many different subdisciplines within linguistics, which are phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, syntax.

What I personally have to criticize are minor methodological uncertainties and structural inconsistencies in the text. First, the indistinct use of the terms bar chart and histogram: Johnson uses the word 'histogram' when talking about categorical data. In my opinion, in this context a histogram cannot be used, but only a bar chart, which is why I consider this as rather confusing. Second, there is an inconsistency concerning the blank spaces in the R formulae. Not only does the use of blanks vary from one function to the next, it also varies even within one function. Although this only seems to be a formal problem, as the formulae still work no matter if the blank spaces are set or not, I consider this as unnecessarily confusing and stylistically unattractive.

Rather useful are the so-called 'R notes' in the text. They contain all the R formulae used for the current problem in one space, which makes it possible to neglect the explanations of statistical concepts in case one is already familiar with them and only needs the fitting functions. Free downloads at the publisher's website support the book.

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