Methods and Applications of Quantitative Linguistics

Preface The contributions to this volume are selected and peer-reviewed papers on the basis of talks which were delivered on the QUALICO 2012 was, as usual, open to original papers without any limitations as to thematic or methodological aspects. Therefore, a large variety of topics has been addressed and numerous fields of linguistics and related fields have been touched. A number of contributions to the conference can be subsumed under the general problem of stylometrics, in particular authorship attribution or text classification with respect to stylistic features unveiling the authors' membership in social or other groups, among them gender, age, or literary tradition. In this volume, George Mikros presents a stylometric approach to the analysis of the language of blogs, where authorship attribution and gender determination are the main topics. Another paper in this group is D. Benedetto's, M. Degli Esposti's, and G. Maspero's report on a specific philological problem of disputed authorship. The approach presented is a mathematical method using an estimation of entropy. Fundamental linguistic research is focussed on by another group of contributions. Beliankou, K ¨ ohler, and Naumann introduce us into a new field of quantitative-linguistic research by giving an example of a study on the analysis of the discourse-pragmatic problem of argumentation structures. J ´ an Mačutek and RadekČech investigate the diversification of the cases of Czech nouns; their results support earlier investigations into comparable matters. Furthermore, interesting facts are found and reported which shed new light on frequency effects in morphology. On the background of the Menzerath-Altmann Law, Peter Grzybek offers results of his research on the relations between sentence length and the lengths of other linguistic levels, which are not directly adjacent to the sentence level. A new mathematical approach to Polikarpov's and Krylov's " word life cycle " hypothesis is presented by Vasiliy Poddubnyy and Anatoliy Polikarpov. They describe a dynamic model of the evolution of linguistic signs based on dissipative processes and provide the empirical data on which the model was tested. Matilde Trevisiani's and Arjuna Tuzzi's paper strana 5 Preface 5 presents a mathematical masterpiece as an attempt at unveiling chronological patterns in the frequency of words in a text corpus. The specifity of this study is that the mathematical model tries to capture not only general tendencies, which could be motivated by linguistic or philological considerations, but at the same time the natural fluctuations and statistical deviations as a …