Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
people. whose relationship to one another was either that of family
member or close friend. Altogether eight one-hour conversations
from Taipei and eight one-hour conversations from Peking form the
data base of this study. One concern which arises once one decides to
utilize so many independent sources of natural data is whether or
not such data is consistent across the board in terms of pragmatic
content. In other words, do these sixteen conversations share a
similar setting, a similar content, and a similar relationship among
each set of participants as one goes from one conversation to
another? In this case the answer to all three concerns is yes, and
thus comparisons within the data can be made with a high degree of
confidence.
In order to understand the significance of the data presented in
Figures I and 2 below, it is necessary to first understand in at least a
rudimentary way what a chi-square analysis indicates. For a more
thorough discussion of this analysis than what is presented here, the
reader may wish to consult either Butler (1985) or Davis (1990).
Simply speaking, a chi-square analysis can be thought of as a means
of determining whether the quantitative differences observed for
two or more sets of token counts are in fact statistically significant or
not. Looking at Figures 1 and 2, one finds information on the actual
number of tokens observed, the expected number of tokens if the
variables of geographical location and sentence type were
independent of each other, the chi-square value (a sum of the
differences between the observed and expected counts), and the
degrees of freedom (a technical term which is difficult to explain, but
which indicates whether the chi-square value is great enough to
signify statistical significance for the data). For the two figures found
below, only one or two degrees of freedom (df) are observed.
According to standard statistical practice, for one degree of freedom,
a chi-square value of 3.8414 or greater indicates statistical
significance, while for two degree of freedom, the necessary value is
5.9914 or greater. Therefore we see that the patterns illustrated in
both of these figures are in fact statistically significant.
Figure 1 illustrates the number of tokens of each of the three yes-
no patterns which are found in each of the two speech communities
when no speaker presupposition exists. In each case, expected
counts are given directly below observed counts. For example, in the
.