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This work is a case study of applying nonparametric statistical methods to corpus data. We show how to use ideas from permutation testing to answer linguistic questions related to morphological productivity and type richness. In particular, we study the use of the suffixes -ity and -ness in the 17thcentury part of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence within the framework of historical sociolinguistics. Our hypothesis is that the productivity of -ity, as measured by type counts, is significantly low in letters written by women. To test such hypotheses, and to facilitate exploratory data analysis, we take the approach of computing accumulation curves for types and hapax legomena. We have developed an open source computer program which uses Monte Carlo sampling to compute the upper and lower bounds of these curves for one or more levels of statistical significance. By comparing the type accumulation from women's letters with the bounds, we are able to confirm our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper promotes a semi-automated approach to corpus studies of discourse phenomena and other phenomena that do not easily lend themselves to computational methods. The approach involves the following components: (a) use of "linguistic proxies" for the phenomena under study, which allow finding and coding tokens in a corpus, (b) automated methods of identifying tokens and adding codes to them, and (c) manual analysis of the tokens, aided by appropriate software tools. In particular, the use of alternating passes of automated and manual analysis is advocated. These methods are illustrated through description of three sub-studies within a project examining the English possessive alternation conducted by the authors. Several advantages of a semi-automated approach are presented, including (a) an improved cycle of exploratory analysis, (b) high levels of accuracy coupled with reasonable levels of speed and consistency. (c) increased explicitness in coding methodology, and (d) the creation of reusable tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]