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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 166
phonemes; count how many subordinate clauses there are in each sentence; and
so on). At this point you know everything that you need to know about the
sample, and can describe it in detail. So it is at this point that you draw graphs,
if graphs are required, or set up tables showing how many occurrences of particular
categories were found.
Again, it is not the function of this text to teach you how to do this, though
you should recognise that drawing appropriate graphs is a skill in itself and that
even interpreting graphs and tables may not always be as straightforward as it
seems. Readings for your various courses should give you plenty of practice at
the interpretative task involved in dealing with such presentations. If you really
want to know about when to draw a line graph and when to draw a bar graph,
what the difference is between a bar graph whose bars touch and one whose
bars are separated out from each other, and why pie charts are no longer seen
as a preferred way of presenting data, you need to do a course in statistics or
read a good statistics book.
At this stage you can also present some summary statistics about your
sample. For example, if you want to know what the average vowel used by
speakers in Birmingham is in some given word, you might simply find some
way of turning the quality you have heard or recorded into numbers (for
example, by carrying out an acoustic analysis, or by assigning a number to each
of several perceptually different versions) and then producing a mean from
those figures (the word ‘average’ is used in so many different ways that most
statisticians prefer to be specific and use words like mean, median and mode; if
your secondary school mathematics is not sufficient to let you know the
difference, you might want to check these three words in some suitable reference
work 1 ). As well as the mean, you probably need to record the standard
deviation, which tells you how much variation there was away from that mean
in your figures. The mean and standard deviations are precisely known for your
sample, because you know values for every member of the sample, but they are
also estimates of what the mean and standard deviation are for the population
as a whole, on the assumption that your sample is representative of the
population as a whole.Remember that if this assumption is not correct your
figures will tell us only about the sample: this situation very often applies in
small-scale undergraduate projects, and you must be careful not to claim too
much for these.
For example, we might find that 17 per cent of restrictive relative clauses in
written British English use that and that 77 per cent contain which or who (the
1 If you really don’t know enough mathematics to distinguish between these terms,
Huff (1954) is a very good and entertaining place to start. The book is now over fifty
years old, and rather quaint in some ways, but it is still readable for those who have
always tried to avoid such matters in the past.