LINGUIST List 11.2043

Mon Sep 25 2000

Qs: Statistical Packages, Linguists' Birth Dates

Editor for this issue: James Yuells <jameslinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. gill cai, Advice on Statistical Packages
2. Mora - Graffi, Linguists' Birth Dates

Dear linguists,

I am writing my PhD dissertation. It intends to investigate how some linguistic 
and non-linguistic factor groups constrain the morphosyntactic markings of 
tense and aspect in English. 
Now I am confused by choosing which statistical package as my analysis tool. 
VARBRUL is one option, but it has some shortcomings. (1) It doesn't have a 
WINDOWS version, and is seldom understood by scholars beyond quantitative 
sociolinguistics. (2) It can't deal with interactions between factor groups. 
Logistic regression in SPSS is another option. Bob Berden (1996) used it instead 
of VARBRUL in the study of negation. But logistic regression is only appropriate 
for dichotomous dependent variables, while my dependent variables have more than 
two values. The third option is GENMOD in SAS. Dr. Robert Bayley kindly informed 
me that Prof. Richard Young and Yandell (1999) had proved that GENMOD could do 
more and better than VARBRUL. Yet I haven't gotten any relevant papers. 

My questions are:
(1)	How many values do the dependent variables have which GENMOD can deal with?
(2)	Does my research seem a little outdated if VARBRUL is used?
(3)	What's the difference between these two tools?

Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,
Cai Jinting

 

I am presently completing a book entitled "History of Syntax in the 19th and
20th Centuries", which will appear with Benjamins, Amsterdam. I would like
to complete it with an index of names containing birth years of all quoted
scholars. Therefore, it would be very helpful to me if I could be informed
about the birth (and in some cases, also of the death) years of the
following linguists:
Abney, Steven
Bartsch, Renate
Besten, Hans den
Billroth, J....
Dowty, David R.
Gough, P.... B.
Greene, Judith
Hamblin, Charles L.
Huang, C. T. James
Jacobs, Joachim
Jeanne, Laverne Masayesva
Kalish, Donald
Kanerva, J... M....
Karttunen, Lauri
Kiparsky, Carol
Lugebil, K...
L�hr, Rosemarie
McKean, K...
Michaelis, C...T...
Moshi, Lioba
Naes, Olav
Panenova, J...
Perchonok, E...
Ritchie, Robert W.
Saito, Mamoru
Savin, H...
Schmidt, Wilhelm
Spang-Hannsen, Henning
Sternefeld, Wolfgang
Taraldsen, Knut Tarald
Travis, Lisa
Vergnaud, Jean-Roger
Wirth, Jessica
Giorgio Graffi
Professor of Linguistics, University of Verona (Italy)
e-mail: moragrafunipv.it