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Finnish Syntax in Text: Methodology and Some Results of a Quantitative Study1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Auli Hakulinen  and
Fred Karlsson
Auli Hakulinen
Affiliation:
Torpankuja 5 A 3, SF–40740 Jyväskylä 74, Finland.
Fred Karlsson
Affiliation:
Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki, Meritullinkatu 14 A 6, SF-00170 Helsinki 17, Finland.
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Abstract

The Paper contains a report on the theory and methodology used in a project on finnish syntax as investigated in (some genres of written) text. 123 texts containing 10,149 clauses (5016 graphical sentences) were analyzed according to a syntactic coding frame containing 63 variables. The variables include sentences structure, clause structure, clause type, clause function, clause length, surface word order, constituent structure, the text semantic and referential properties of nominal constituents, and some movement and deletion transformations. The theoretical considerations behind the selection of the variables are discussed in detail, as are the principles for syntactic sampling. The usefulness of the computer for certain low-level tasks is demonstrated, such as finding correlations between variables. The relevance of quantitative data to ‘qualitative’ syntactic description is stressed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1980 , pp. 93 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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