Methods in Quantitative Linguistics

Juhan Tuldava

Methods in Quantitative Linguistics. Preface by G. Altmann

ISBN 978-3-88476-126-7, ISBN 3-88476-126-9, 186 S., kt., € 20,50 (1995)

(QL - Quantitative Linguistics, Bd. 54)

Juhan Tuldava (*1922), Professor emeritus at the University of Tartu (Estonia), is the founder of the Tartu school of quantitative linguistics and was for many years the head of the text-analytical group of quantitative linguistics in the former SU. He has published a great number of papers and books on different aspects of quantitative linguistics; however, because of political and language problems, his work remained almost unknown in the Western world.

By request of the editorial board of this series he collected in the present book those papers which best represent his philosophy, his methodology, and the directions he introduced in East European linguistics. Besides phonological problems and general issues such as casuality and contingency, most articles are concerned with analysis, characterisation, comparison, and classification of texts and styles. They show solutions to both classical and modern problems of textology.

The reader will find there a number of useful quantitative models of language and text phenomena presented in a very clear, didactically agreeable form. On the one hand, this book can be used as a textbook introduction to the aforementioned fields of quantitative linguistic research. On the other, it is a stimulating source of new research problems, and a valuable repository of quantitative linguistic methods for their solution.