Quantitative Analysis :

Quantitative Analysis Kyle Gorman and Daniel Ezra Johnson A sociolinguist who has gathered so much data that it has become difficult to make sense of the raw observations can turn to graphical presentation, and to descriptive statistics, techniques for distilling a collection of data into a few key numerical values, allowing the researcher to focus on specific, meaningful properties of the data set (see, e.g., Johnson in press). However, the sociolinguist is rarely satisfied with a mere snapshot of linguistic behavior, and desires not just to describe, but to evaluate hypotheses about the connections between linguistic behavior, speakers, and society. The researcher begins this process by gathering data with the potential to falsify the hypotheses under consideration (e.g. Lucas, Bayley, & Valli 2001: 43). A sociolinguist who suspects that women and men in a certain speech community differ in the rate at which they realize the final consonant of a word ending in with coronal [n] rather than velar [ŋ] would collect tokens of these words in the speech of women and men, recording which variant was used. While this data, in the form of a descriptive statistic or an appropriate graph, could suggest that women differ from men in the rate at which they use these competing variants, these techniques cannot exclude the possibility that this difference is due to random chance. Inferential statistics allow the researcher to compute the probability that a hypothesized property of the data is due to chance, and to estimate the magnitude of the hypothesized effect.