An application of Fisher`s exact test in linguistic research

Abstract

Fisher’s Exact Test (FET), proposed 90 years ago by the famous pioneering statistician Ronald A. Fisher, is one of the most useful and long-lasting statistical methods for finding the exact permutation significance levels of contingency tables. In particular, for testing whether two classification criteria in 2×2 contingency tables are independent in the situation of small cell frequencies, the much more rapid normal approximation and chi-square calculation are liable to be inaccurate; therefore, the FET can be used instead. In this article, we introduce the FET to the broad audience of researchers/teachers/students in theoretical linguistics by applying the FET to a set of categorical data obtained from research on the mathematical interpretation of plural markers such as the English /-s/ suffix in the world’s languages. We hope the contents of this article can be of meaningful use for the broad audience of readers mentioned above.