Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

S. KULKARNI
4. Quantitative Analyses of Three Linguistic Variables
4.1 The variable (N)
Table 1 presents a summary of the results of the Linear Logistic Regression
analysis for (N) using data from 114 of the 125 adolescent informants in the
sample. 9,613 linguistic tokens were used in the following analysis.
Table 1. Statistical results for the social correlates of ‘N’
Terms in Deviance d.f. F-ratio p-value
model
constant 6452.4975 113
+ caste 5168.4986 110 12.09 < 0.001
+ sex 4917.6131 109 7.09 0.009
+ em 4478.8393 107 6.2 0.003
+ ef 4372.8539 105 1.5 0.2774
+ of 4279.8227 104 2.63 0.5852
+ caste*sex 4100.402 101 1.69 0.2197
+ caste*em 3740.2251 95 1.70 0.2229
+ sex*em 3660.1190 93 1.13 0.3058
+ caste*of 3267.007 90 3.7 0.015
+ sex*of 3266.0893 89 0.03 0.8747
+ em*of 3082.8759 87 2.59 0.081
The linear logistic models were first fitted, adding one explanatory factor (or
main effect) at a time, (indicated by [+caste], [+em], [+ef], and so on in the
table above where em = mother’s education, ef = father’s education and of =
father’s occupation). The deviances for the nested models were compared
using F-tests, comparing each difference with the residual mean difference
for the model with all explanatory factors 3 .
For example
( D*. constant – D. caste) / (d.f. constant – d.f. caste)
(Deviance for the largest model) / d.f. for the largest model
3 For details of the statistical procedure used refer to Collett 1991, Chapter 6.
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