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Article published In: Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 5:1 (2022) ► pp.1–33

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What do (some of) our association measures measure (most)? Association?

 | University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Published online: 12 November 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.21028.gri
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The conflation of frequency and association
    • 2.1Hypothetical data and G2’s behavior
      • 2.1.1A collocation/collostruction example
      • 2.1.2A keyness example
    • 2.2Actual data and G2’s behavior
    • 2.3Actual data and t’s behavior
    • 2.4Actual data and MI’s behavior
  • 3.Interim discussion
    • 3.1Some general remarks
    • 3.2MI, MI2, and MI3
    • 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
References (27)
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