Statistical methods are vital in quantitative linguistics.
Although the host of theoretical background involves complicated mathematics, the usage of the tools most relevant to linguistics, e.g. standard deviation or the c 2 test, are relatively simple. While information theory is the major method for staistical NLP, its central assumpitions are foreshadowed in the Zipf's laws. Equal area on both sides. Peak in distribution graph. While we often expect normal distribution in qualitative measures, we often expect an even distribution in quantitative measures.