FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FICTIONAL PROSE STYLE WERE STUDIED THROUGH SYSTEMATIC AND OBJECTIVE ANALYSES OF NOVELISTIC SYNTAX AND VOCABULARY. SAMPLE PASSAGES FROM THE MAJOR NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN, THE BRONTE SISTERS, AND GEORGE ELIOT AS WELL AS NOVELS BY 13 OTHER AUTHORS WERE ANALYZED. INFORMATION ON PASSAGE SENTENCES, CLAUSES, AND WORDS WAS…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ANALYSIS WAS TO DISCOVER CERTAIN ASPECTS OF STYLE (BOTH LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL) WHICH COULD BE COUNTED AND WHICH WOULD, WHEN COMPARED, DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN THE WRITTEN PROSE OF TWO AUTHORS. THE SUBJECT SELECTED FOR ANALYSIS WAS "THE O'RUDDY," BEGUN BY STEPHEN CRANE AND COMPLETED BY ROBERT BARR. SINCE THERE WAS NO…

Certain word-order patterns are more basic and less marked than others. The more strongly marked a pattern seems to be in isolation, the stronger must be the contextual forces motivating its use, if it is to seem natural in a text. Various topicalizations (of adverbials, objects, and parts of verb phrases, for example) need various degrees of…

Who wrote "The Groatsworth of Wit?" Was it Greene, as hitherto believed, or Chettle? To distinguish between the two writers' styles, and thereby determine the authorship of a 16th Century literary work of particular interest to Shakespearean scholars, computer-aided techniques were employed. The two authors' differing practices in word…

IN AN EFFORT TO DEVELOP ACCURATE FORMULAS FOR PREDICTING AND CONTROLLING THE READABILITY OF LANGUAGE, FIVE BASIC PROBLEMS WERE STUDIED--(1) THE VARIOUS FEATURES OF WRITING STYLE AS LINEARLY RELATED TO COMPREHENSION DIFFICULTIES, (2) THE CHANGE OF STRENGTHS OF RELATIONSHIPS AS A FUNCTION OF READING ABILITY, (3) READABILITY PREDICTION MADE UPON…