<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>Quantitative, corpus based research on spontaneous spoken Carpathian Rusyn language can cause several data-related problems: Speakers are using ambivalent forms in different quantities, resulting in a biased data set – while a stricter data-cleaning process would lead to a large scale data loss. On top of that, polytomous categorical dependent variables are hard to analyze due to methodological limitations. This paper provides several approaches to face unbalanced and biased data sets containing variation of conjugational forms of the verb <italic>maty</italic> ‘to have’ and <italic>(po-)znaty</italic> ‘to know’ in Carpathian Rusyn language. Using resampling based methods like Cross-Validation, Bootstrapping and Random Forests, we provide a strategy for circumventing possible methodological pitfalls and gaining the most information from our precious data, without trying to p-hack the results. Calculating the predictive power of several sociolinguistic factors on linguistic variation, we can make valid statements about the (sociolinguistic) status of Rusyn and the stability of the old dialect continuum of Rusyn varieties.</p>
</abstract>

Quantitative, corpus based research on spontaneous spoken Carpathian Rusyn language can cause several data-related problems: Speakers are using ambivalent forms in different quantities, resulting in a biased data set – while a stricter data-cleaning process would lead to a large scale data loss. On top of that, polytomous categorical dependent variables are hard to analyze due to methodological limitations. This paper provides several approaches to face unbalanced and biased data sets containing variation of conjugational forms of the verb maty ‘to have’ and (po-)znaty ‘to know’ in Carpathian Rusyn language. Using resampling based methods like Cross-Validation, Bootstrapping and Random Forests, we provide a strategy for circumventing possible methodological pitfalls and gaining the most information from our precious data, without trying to p-hack the results. Calculating the predictive power of several sociolinguistic factors on linguistic variation, we can make valid statements about the (sociolinguistic) status of Rusyn and the stability of the old dialect continuum of Rusyn varieties.

A Robust Approach to Variation in Carpathian Rusyn: Resampling-Based Methods for Small Data Sets

Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Quantitative, corpus based research on spontaneous spoken Carpathian Rusyn language can cause several data-related problems: Speakers are using ambivalent...

A Robust Approach to Variation in Carpathian Rusyn: Resampling-Based Methods for Small Data Sets

Published Online: Dec 30, 2021

Page range: 603 - 617

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2021-0055

Keywords
oral corpora, border effects, language variation, spoken language corpus, robust statistics, Carpathian Rusyn

© 2021 Moulay Zaidan Lahjouji-Seppälä et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

A Robust Approach to Variation in Carpathian Rusyn: Resampling-Based Methods for Small Data Sets

Published Online: Dec 30, 2021

Page range: 603 - 617

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2021-0055

Keywordsoral corpora, border effects, language variation, spoken language corpus, robust statistics, Carpathian Rusyn

© 2021 Moulay Zaidan Lahjouji-Seppälä et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
oral corpora, border effects, language variation, spoken language corpus, robust statistics, Carpathian Rusyn