Warring States Project
Stylistics

Vermeer: Lady Writing a Letter

People may use rare words for an archaic effect, or long sentences for a sonorous one. And the way the language of a piece of writing holds together, its articulation, is also an aspect of style: the aspect most independent of content. It will be obvious that rarity of words can be measured, and that length of sentences can be measured. It is a little less obvious that the degree of articulation of a piece of writing can be measured, and if so, how.

It turns out that articulation can be measured. To the extent that we define style as the way a piece of prose hangs together, we can create a tool capable of registering the degree of stylistic similarity between two samples of text. Dissimilarity in style need not imply difference of authorship; writers may vary from their own norm if they are agitated, or depressed, or influenced by the style of some other text. But along with any other information that may be available, stylistic difference data are analytically useful. Like every other observational result, style analysis results will in the end be submitted for interpretation to the investigator's literary sensibility. But it is an advantage if the stylistic analysis itself had been reached by a method that others can duplicate, and is not simply the shadow of the investigator's sensibility.

The tool is universal in application, but has so far been implemented only for English and Chinese. Here, for quick sampling, are some results obtained in those languages:

. . . but for a methodologically orderly tour of these examples, starting with a bit of theory (but avoiding the mathematics), instead click HERE .

We now turn to some colalborative projects:

To Concordances

8 Sept 2005 / Contact The Project / To Home Page