The Statistical Analysis of Morphosyntactic Distributions

This paper describes methods for the statistical analysis of quantitative data on the distribution of morphosyntactic features. A key problem is the large amount of ambiguity in automatically extracted data. In the paper, I argue for a conservative approach that treats ambiguous instances as counter-evidence. It is nonetheless possible to obtain detailed morphosyntactic information from the corpus data with the help of partial disambiguation and by exploiting systematic ambiguity classes. 1