Foxpro

Studies in Quantitative Linguistics 9

“Data Processing and Management for Quantitative Linguists with Foxpro”
Fan, Fengxiang
ISBN: 978-3-942303-03-3
Contents Studies 9 (free of charge)
PDF-file Studies 9 download link (book) 15.00 EUR
Appendix download link 5.00
Printed Edition (45.00 EUR) order to RAM-Verlag
 studies9

 

Preface

Imagine a researcher of Shakespearean plays is studying the Bard’s stylistic

characteristics with the quantitative approach. He has all the plays totalling about

a million words stored in XML files. The immediate task before him is to remove

all the XML codes from the files to get “pure” text. Next, he needs the following

data: a wordlist with frequencies and word length both in letters and syllables, the

vocabulary richness and frequency spectrum of each of the plays, lexical

similarity and distance among the plays, the average word length in syllables and

the average sentence length of each of the plays, collocations of certain words,

number of rare words—hapax legomena, vocabulary growth rate, etc. However,

life of a linguistic researcher is not as simple as that. To get a wordlist with word

frequencies he’ll need to lemmatize all the word tokens in those plays, and as the

research progresses, some ad hoc research inspirations may pop up and new data

are needed; he also has to constantly rearrange the data trying to find some

patterns and retrieve some for a closer look, etc. These tasks would take ages to

complete manually. The well known American scholar Ione Dodson Young used

25 years to make a concordance for the complete poetic works of Byron; she

started the work in 1940 and didn’t compete it until 1965!

With Foxpro, a powerful data processing and managing system, all the above

can be done in a matter of a few minutes. This book, Data Processing and

Management for Quantitative Linguistics with Foxpro gives detailed descriptions

and instructions on how to gather, process and manage large amount of linguistic

data with this data managing system. This book is aimed at literary and linguistic

researchers, teachers and students at the undergraduate or postgraduate levels,

EFL/ESL teachers and students, etc. It is also a very good book for corpus

linguistics, text mining, information retrieval, and natural language processing.

No previous computer programming experience is required of the reader except

the ability to use the Windows Operating System.

All the examples for the commands and functions, as well as the

demonstration programs in the book, are literary/linguistic oriented and of the

author’s own creation, and the majority of them are immediately useful for

serious research, after changing only the input and output file names and their

path. This book can be used as a course book that takes roughly 36-lab hours to

complete; it can also be used for self-study. There is a CD-ROM attached to the

book with all the Foxpro tables, examples, demonstration programs and

non-copy-right textual materials for all the programs, exercises and model

answers to these exercises.

There are different versions of Foxpro, and the latest version is Visual

Foxpro 9. The Foxpro needed in this book is Foxpro 6 or higher. Foxpro can

process any language in the world; however, in this book, it’s used mainly to deal

with English, occasionally Chinese. With some changes, the programs in the

book can also be adapted to process other languages.

II

The following are some suggestions for tackling this book.

Firstly, this book is not for reading, but for careful reading plus repeated

practice. That is, the reader should sit in front of the computer trying out each of

the operators, commands, functions and examples many, many times while

reading it. The operators, commands and functions in this book, totalling about

200, were carefully selected and are the most fundamental for linguistic

computing. In some other computer languages there are fewer commands and

functions; however, the users have to create commands and functions themselves

when needed, and this makes these types of languages more difficult to learn and

use for linguistic researchers and students. The reader of this book is not

expected to remember all these operators, commands, functions, etc, by heart. He

or she can always come back to this book to refresh his or her memory.

Secondly, as mentioned before, used as a course book, it’ll take about a

semester, roughly 36 lab hours to complete, and for each lab hour, the students

need at least two more hours for home practice. For self-study, it’ll take half a

year. A person hurrying through the book in 10 days will probably learn nothing.

Thirdly, all the examples and exercises were carefully planned. The reader is

not expected to solve all the problems in the exercises. One of the purposes of the

exercises is for making the reader think about the possible applications of the

operators, commands and functions etc learned; if the reader is unable to do the

exercises, that’s perfectly normal for a beginner; in such cases, go to the model

answers, analyse them and then try them out. This is an important learning

process.

Lastly, the author hopes that the above will not scare off potential readers.

Please bear in mind that there are no magic books in the world from which a

beginner can learn a computer language in 10 or 20 days. Learning a computer

language from scratch is not like reading Shakespeare or Goethe for the first time;

it’s a long and sometimes painful process, and patience and perseverance are a

must. But once learned, it’ll be an open sesame for the learner to the wonderful

linguistic and literary treasure trove that can last a life time.

The author is deeply indebted to Professor Gabriel Altmann for his insightful

suggestions for this book and for his constant stimulating research ideas from

which the author has benefited greatly; without his support this book wouldn’t be

possible. The author also wishes to thank Professor Reinhard Köhler for reading

the manuscript and for his expert advice.

Fan Fengxiang