Measuring Language Diversity with Digital Methods
EN
Understanding how languages vary in the way they build expressions is essential for studying texts across periods and languages, yet traditional descriptions capture only a fraction of this diversity. Patternization is an approach that combines traditional text analysis and corpus linguistics with mathematical methods into a Python tool that allows us to explore such syntactic variation: it treats phrases as sequences of category labels and compares the patterns that actually appear with the full range of patterns that could appear. This task is hardly feasible if performed manually, illustrating how digital methods can reveal nuances otherwise invisible to the human eye.