Article published In:
Journal of Second Language StudiesVol. 5:1 (2022) ► pp.1–33
What do (some of) our association measures measure (most)? Association?
This paper discusses the degree to which some of the most widely-used measures of association in corpus
linguistics are not particularly valid in the sense of actually measuring association rather than some amalgam of a lot of
frequency and a little association. The paper demonstrates these issues on the basis of hypothetical and actual corpus data and
outlines implications of the findings. I then outline how to design an association measure that only measures association and show
that its behavior supports the use of the log odds ratio as a true association-only measure but separately from frequency; in
addition, this paper sets the stage for an analogous review of dispersion measures in corpus linguistics.
Keywords: association, frequency, dispersion, log-likelihood,
t
,
MI
, generalized additive modeling
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The conflation of frequency and association
- 2.1Hypothetical data and G
2’s behavior
- 2.1.1A collocation/collostruction example
- 2.1.2A keyness example
- 2.2Actual data and G 2’s behavior
- 2.3Actual data and t’s behavior
- 2.4Actual data and MI’s behavior
- 2.1Hypothetical data and G
2’s behavior
- 3.Interim discussion
- 3.1Some general remarks
- 3.2 MI, MI 2, and MI 3
- 3.3A brief comment on (log) Dice
- 4.A new measure
- 4.1Motivation and development
- 4.2Application to fast
- 5.A small excursus
- 6.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
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