The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

3.1.1 Statistics 
The data resulting from the annotation process is explored using three different 
statistical measures. I will exemplify all three tests in the following discussion, using an 
example from the study. The data is provided only to illustrate the statistical tests; a full 
description of this specific example is given in §4.2.1.
M
OVANTS
are classified into one 
of three categories: physical inanimate, 
physical 
animate 
and 
nonphysical 
(inanimate). The resulting data count is 
shown in table 1. 
The first test performed on the 
data was the 
Chi-square Test
. This test is used to compute the probability that the 
distribution (i.e. the values that appear in the table) found in the sample could be this uneven 
or even more extreme. The chi-square results for table 1 show that with a X-squared of 73.83 
and a df of 6, the p-value is 6.697E-14 (or 0.00000000000006697, moving the decimal point 
14 places to the left). The relevant value is the p-value. If it is below 0.05 it is standardly 
considered statistically significant (King & Minium 2008:255-256). Significance indicates 
that there is a relationship between the choice of verb and the type of 
MOVANT
it appears 
with. It also means that the results are not an effect of the sample, but can be assumed to 
apply to the entire CdE corpus (Tummers et al. 2005:242).
The Chi-square test is able to detect smaller and smaller relationships as the size of 
the sample grows. The 
Cramer’s V
measure is used to check the size of the effect detected 
by a Chi-square test; that is, it measures how strong the relationship is between the choice of 
verb and a specific variable. A Cramer’s V value of 0.5 represents a large effect, 0.3 
represents a medium effect, and 0.1 represents a small effect (King & Minium 2008:327-
329)
. 
The Cramer’s V for the data in table 1 is 0.3133. There is a medium effect between the 
choice of verb and the type of 
MOVANT
.
If the previous two statistical tests show that the data was significant, a final test is 
run: the