Do women produce more words than men do? Does it matter whether you say "I gave Mary the book" or "I gave the book to Mary"? Can you tell, from the way a wine is described, whether it is expensive or cheap? These and many other language questions can be addressed using statistics.

This course is a hands-on introduction to working with text data. It includes an introduction to programming in Python, and an introduction to statistics. We will use language problems like the ones above to introduce concepts from statistics, and will use linguistic datasets to do statistical analyses. 

Prerequisites: Upper-division standing.

Textbook:
P. R. Hinton (2004): Statistics Explained: A Guide for Social Science Students. Psychology Press; 3rd edition, 2014