Stylometry

Stylometry (English stylometrics, stylometry; French stylométrie ) is a discipline that studies leading to the linguistic style with means of statistics. The term appears in the 19th century.

Objects of stylometry

Among the objects of stylometry include the characterization and the comparison of the style of authors, genres, individual works, epochs and the identification of anonymous authors as well as the temporal classification of plants. Also for the criminalistics ( forensic linguistics) it has meaning, eg in the analysis of anonymous documents. Their methods range from simple counts of style properties that are considered for striking characteristic or otherwise interesting enough to the application of sophisticated techniques such as factor analysis and mathematical modeling of styles. Stylometry is so far largely identical to Quantitative Stylistics or style statistics.

Stylométrie as an integrative concept

In the French linguistics is stylométrie but also used programmatically to delineate the quantitative stylistics ( stylistique quantitative ): To use Zemb (1970: 215) the term explicitly, in order to dispel the view that there is a fundamental difference between quantity and quality. As a special presentation means he proposes Stilo grams ( stylogrammes ) are graphical illustrations of stylistic features that illustrate the difference between authors or works. Zemb also shows that the Stilo grams of healthy and mentally ill are significantly different.

Stylometry in Russian Literature

In the Russian literature has NA Morozov (1854-1946) introduced the concept stylometry 1915/16. "The aim of the investigation of Morozov is to find stylometric laws he postulated in analogy to regularities in nature and in social life. " Despite the errors in the application of his approach to Pushkin, Tolstoy, Lermontov and Plato the methodological aspect is of interest, Kelih (p. 47).