Kwantificeren van stijl

Samenvatting

Quantitative methods to analyze style usually are applied in research which tries to attribute a text of uncertain authorship to a certain author. The uniqueness of authors (which is generally assumed) has been looked for in a.o. word length, sentence length, type-token ratio, lexical richness and lexical preferences. In recent years, researchers focused on textual and linguistic characteristics which are assumed to be the result of unconscious processes. In this context, measuring high frequency words became very important. The best results seem to be yielded by a measure called Burrows's Delta. In this paper the most important ways of measuring in the field of quantitative analysis of style and of non-traditional authorship attribution will be reviewed. The first results of a quantitative analysis of the lexicon of the Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Walewein, applying a form of Burrows's Delta procedure, are summarized to illustrate the possibilities of this type of research.