1 - The Statistical Study of Literary Style

Abstract

This chapter presents a statistical study of literary style. While Mendenhall had been using stylistic statistics in the attempt to solve attribution problems in English, European scholars had been developing stylometric techniques for Greek to settle the disputed chronology of Plato's dialogues. The work of these and other Platonic scholars was magisterially synthesized by the scholar W. Lutoslawski. The stylistic features studied by the Platonic scholars were much more subtle and sophisticated than the crude measure of word-length investigated by Mendenhall. On the other hand, Mendenhall had a surer grasp of statistical principles than Lutoslawski, despite the impressiveness of some of the latter's numerical tables. In the present century, sentence length has been studied as a distinctive characteristic of individual writers.