Language Individuation and Marker Words: Shakespeare and His Maxwell's Demon.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Within the structural and grammatical bounds of a common language, all authors develop their own distinctive writing styles. Whether the relative occurrence of common words can be measured to produce accurate models of authorship is of particular interest. This work introduces a new score that helps to highlight such variations in word occurrence, and is applied to produce models of authorship of a large group of plays from the Shakespearean era.

Methodology

A text corpus containing 55,055 unique words was generated from 168 plays from the Shakespearean era (16th and 17th centuries) of undisputed authorship. A new score, CM1, is introduced to measure variation patterns based on the frequency of occurrence of each word for the authors John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Tho

SUBMITTER: Marsden J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3694980 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature