Statistical Linguistic, Quantitative Rhethoric and the Effect of Perspective
Quantification, which we can define briefly as the description of phenomena by means of numbers, is a familiar and indispensable approach : the question “How much ? ” is probably one of the most common one asks about almost anything. But the tools used to answer alter our perception of quantified phenomena. We will examine here some of the effects of perspective that can be generated by operations as basic as the construction of categories and processing data in percentages. To explore and illustrate the effects of perspective, we will mainly use statistics, highly charged on the symbolic level such as in language, which were often in the context of Canada and Quebec, the source of controversy and the subject of manipulation for political purposes.