Ch. 2 | Exercise 4

Chapter 2 | Exercise 4

Create a data set Linguists in a spreadsheet with the information shown in Table 2.1 and import it in R as a data frame. Mind the spaces!

Table 2.1. Data set Linguists

Last name	First name	Framework	Born	Died
de Saussure	Ferdinand	Structuralism	1857	1913
Chomsky	Noam	Generative Linguistics	1928	NA
Lakoff	George	Cognitive Linguistics	1941	NA

Key

Create an Excel spreadsheet with the information from the table. Save the file as a text (Tab delimited) file or as a comma-separated .csv file. Next, read the table in R. For a tab-delimited file, the code is as follows:

> linguists <- read.table("Your/Path/linguists.txt", header = TRUE, sep = "\t")
> linguists
     Last.name First.name              Framework Born Died
1 de Saussure   Ferdinand          Structuralism 1857 1913
2     Chomsky        Noam Generative Linguistics 1928   NA
3      Lakoff      George  Cognitive Linguistics 1941   NA

If you saved the data as a comma-separated file (.csv) and the separator is comma, the code is as follows:

> linguists <- read.csv("Your/Path/linguists.csv")
> linguists
[output omitted]

In case the separator is the semicolon, use read.csv2():

> linguists <- read.csv2("Your/Path/linguists.csv")

Note that in the .csv cases, the default option is header = TRUE.