Mission
This book is work in progress. I restarted essentially from scratch in 2025, and I hope two designated a-authors will join shortly. It’s a cleanly frequentist introduction to statistics without any friggin’ software package. In this book you get to use paper, a pen, and a pocket calculator. Why does “hands-on introduction to statistics” always mean that we’re flooded with R commands starting on page 1? This book is for people without a deadline who would like to do some serious thinking (with me) about what inferential frequentist statistics actually does for us, but without the usual misinterpretations. No real-life data sets are used in this book, only intentionally simplified fictional examples from toy linguistics and lots of simulations. Who cares about the examples anyway? As I’m not a statistician and above all not perfect, please don’t hesitate to look at whatever is there at the moment. If you find errors, tear the PDF apart, throw it in my face, and tell me about those errors as harshly as you can. Yell at me if necessary! I’m serious. As opposed to many of our colleagues, I find nothing more satisfying than being corrected and understanding why I was wrong. I’m not being ironic, sarcastic, or what have you. Email me or submit a ticket on GitHub.
Progress is expected to stall around April and May due to the German semester beginning mid-April.
Progress on Chapters (21 March 2025)
1 Scientific Inference and Error (0%)
2 Inference: Successes and Failures (100%)
3 Data: Central Tendency and Variance (100%)
4 Estimation: Means and Proportions (100%)
5 Inference: Mean Differences (100%)
6 Inference: Three or More Means (0%)
7 Inference: Making Positive Inferences (0%)
8 Inference: This and That (0%)
9 Data: Co-Varying Variables (0%)
10 Modelling: Linear Relationships (0%)
11 Modelling: Arbitrary Outcomes (0%)
12 Modelling: Grouped Data (50%) – Will be based on this.
Downloads and GitHub
The GitHub links to this work in progress:
PDF direct: https://github.com/rsling/Inferencelinguistics/blob/main/main.pdf
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/rsling/Inferencelinguistics