A comprehensive overview of principles and problems when turning language into figures. Methods of data gathering, counting and serving are covered, as well as ethics, norm and criterion referencing, reliability and validity, and how quantification connects with research design or pedagogical use.

Quantifying Language Dynamics: On the Cutting Edge of Areal and Phylogenetic Linguistics contains specially-selected papers introducing new, quantitative methodologies for understanding language interaction and evolution. It draws upon data from the phonologies, morphologies, numeral systems, constituent orders, case systems, and lexicons of the world’s languages, bringing large datasets and sophisticated statistical techniques to bear on fundamental questions such as: how to identify and account for areal distributions, when language contact leads to grammatical simplification, whether patterns of morphological borrowing can be predicted, how to deal with contact within phylogenetic models, and what new techniques are most effective for classification of the world’s languages. The book is relevant for students and scholars in general linguistics, typology, and historical and comparative linguistics.

Software is one of the most important products in human history and is widely used by all industries and all countries. It is also one of the most expensive and labor-intensive products in human history. Software also has very poor quality that has caused many major disasters and wasted many millions of dollars. Software is also the target of frequent and increasingly serious cyber-attacks. Among the reasons for these software problems is a chronic lack of reliable quantified data. This reference provides quantified data from many countries and many industries based on about 26,000 projects developed using a variety of methodologies and team experience levels. The data has been gathered between 1970 and 2017, so interesting historical trends are available. Since current average software productivity and quality results are suboptimal, this book focuses on "best in class" results and shows not only quantified quality and productivity data from best-in-class organizations, but also the technology stacks used to achieve best-in-class results. The overall goal of this book is to encourage the adoption of best-in-class software metrics and best-in-class technology stacks. It does so by providing current data on average software schedules, effort, costs, and quality for several industries and countries. Because productivity and quality vary by technology and size, the book presents quantitative results for applications between 100 function points and 100,000 function points. It shows quality results using defect potential and DRE metrics because the number one cost driver for software is finding and fixing bugs. The book presents data on cost of quality for software projects and discusses technical debt, but that metric is not standardized. Finally, the book includes some data on three years of software maintenance and enhancements as well as some data on total cost of ownership.

Quantification forms a significant aspect of cross-linguistic research into both sentence structure and meaning. This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It paints a vivid picture of generalized quantifiers and Boolean semantics. It explains how the discovery of diverse scope behaviour in the 1990s transformed the view of quantification, and how the study of the internal composition of quantifiers has become central in recent years. It presents different approaches to the same problems, and links modern logic and formal semantics to advances in generative syntax. A unique feature of the book is that it systematically brings cross-linguistic data to bear on the theoretical issues, covering French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Telugu (Dravidian), and Shupamem (Grassfield Bantu) and points to formal semantic literature involving quantification in around thirty languages.

Vocabulary richness, including lexical diversity and use of rare words, has an important role in assessing proficiency, diagnosing progress and testing theory in the study of language development. This book reviews different methods for quantifying how vocabulary is deployed in spontaneous speech and writing, before introducing an alternative approach which can assess overall lexical diversity, measure morphology development and compare the development of different word classes. The new approach is illustrated by its application to first and second language learners.

The primary goal of this volume is to present cutting-edge examples of mining large and naturalistic datasets to discover important principles of cognition and to evaluate theories in a way that would not be possible without such scale. It explores techniques that have been underexploited by cognitive psychologists and explains how big data from numerous sources can inform researchers with different research interests and shed further light on how brain, cognition and behavior are interconnected. The book fills a major gap in the literature and has the potential to rapidly advance knowledge throughout the field. It is essential reading for any cognitive psychology researcher.

This extended collection of papers is the result of putting recent ideas on quantification to work on a wide variety of languages. A central perspective of many of the papers follows the recognition of two broad types of quantificational strategies, one associated with nominal structures and determiners, the other with adverbial and other non-nominal expression (`D-quantifiers' and `A-quantifiers'). The papers demonstrate both the unity and the variety of natural language quantificational forms and meanings. Many of the papers also shed new light on questions of language typology and syntactic and morphological variation. The languages discussed include English, Dutch, Italian, American Sign Language, Hindi, and a number of languages of Australia, Greenland, and the Americas. These comparative studies provide initial data for a typology of quantificational structures in natural languages, with important implications for the study of universal grammar. The book consists of research papers aimed at linguists, philosophers, and psychologists interested in semantics and linguistic form. An introduction presents a sketch of the background of this research and some of the central issues discussed, with pointers toward the included papers.

Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition provides an examination of the background to testing vocabulary knowledge in a second language and in particular considers the effect that word frequency and lexical coverage have on learning and communication in a foreign language. It examines the tools we have for assessing the various facets of vocabulary knowledge such as aural and written word recognition, the link with word meaning, and vocabulary depth. These are illustrated and the scores they produce are demonstrated to provide normative data. Vocabulary acquisition from course books and in the classroom in examined, as is vocabulary uptake from informal tasks. This book ties scores on tests of vocabulary breadth to performance on standard foreign language examinations and on hierarchies of communicative performance such as the CEFR.