Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I evaluated this book for use in my course in quantitative corpus linguistics and decided not to use it. The problem is not with the content, which is impressive; Gries knows his stuff and I learned a lot. Unfortunately, the format, structure, and execution of this book are seriously botched, and in the end I didn't want to subject my students to the pain that I suffered having to read it. Here are the major problems: (1) The exercise boxes promised in the introduction are inexplicably missing from the text (you need to go to the web site to find them). (2) The typeface is painfully tiny. (3) Some chapters are way too long (Chapter 3 is close to 100 pages, almost half the book). (4) The R code listings are even more unreadable than normal because all the whitespace has been replaced, for no good reason (R ignores whitespace), with gigantic black dots. (5) The index is one of the worst I've ever seen; for example, you won't find "bigram" or "ordinal" in the index, but the entry for "retrieve/search" (whatever that means) points to almost 100 pages. Linguists who want a general introduction to quantitative methods (not specific to corpora) would be much better off with the excellent texts from Johnson or Baayen.
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The first textbook of its kind, Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R demonstrates how to usethe open source programming language R for corpus linguistic analyses. Computational and corpus linguists doing corpus work will find that R provides an enormous range of functions that currently require several programs to achieve- searching and processing corpora, arranging and outputting the results of corpus searches, statistical evaluation, and graphing.
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