This book bridges the current quantitative and qualitative text
analyses, using grammar as a crucial source of investigation. Taking
data from Czech, an inflected language, in which the most optimal
conditions to respond to this research question are met, the book
expands the understanding of language and text in ways that have not
been executed before. For predominantly English-based quantitative
research, this volume fills a crucial gap by examining the relationship
between inflection and other phenomena (including discourse, translation
and literature). For the current qualitative research, the volume
provides large empirical data to confirm some of its claims, but more
importantly, it demonstrates the important role of detailed grammatical
concepts that have not been considered before. Besides addressing
fundamental questions about text analysis methods, the volume presents a
diverse array of Czech data that are unique in their own right and
worthy of dissemination to the general audience.
Taming the Corpus: From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation is
divided into three sections. Section 1 deals with phonotactics, poetic
structure, morphological complexity used to differentiate literary
style, and native speakers' sense of grammaticality - issues pertinent
to linguistic typology, cognition and language, and literary studies.
Section 2 focuses on inter-language relations, especially the theory of
translation. Section 3 demonstrates how quantitative analysis of texts
can contribute to our understanding of society and connects the volume
to legal language, construction of gender and discourse position and
implicit ideology.
