[OT] Text analysis and author, anyone done it?

[Richmond Mathewson]

On 07/03/2011 11:27 AM, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> My own purpose is not to do with religious texts, but it seems like the
> example is getting in the way of the subject.  There's no reason why
> statistical analysis shouldn't work on textual analysis.  Whether it does,
> and which method is best, and which language is best to do it in, these are
> all empirical questions to be settled by studies.  I haven't had time to do
> much work on the problem yet, but it seems at first glance as if LC is a
> reasonable choice.  Its going to be a tradeoff between speed and statistics
> libraries ready made, which you would get in R, and the string manipulation
> and rapid development that you get with LC.
>
> I'm quite skeptical about the idea that when we write for different
> purposes, we vary the parameters which are used for textual analysis.  One
> of the key characteristics of a native speaker is the ability to create an
> infinite number of grammatically correct different expressions.  This
> doesn't happen randomly, its rule based, and its a bit like the gait when
> walking, it is a quite deep feature of our use of language. Its a reasonable
> hypothesis that even when writing for different purposes and audiences, our
> writing will be generated in accordance with the same rules.

Chomskyite attempts to fit language into a mathematical paradigm led me
many years ago to Cognitive Linguistics, and end up writing an MA thesis 
which
ended up with one of my supervisors getting all hot under the collar 
because I took
quite a few ideas from Functionalism:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/richmondslinguistics/

> But its not a matter for belief, this is an empirical question.  One could
> take, for instance Bertrand Russell, who wrote for specialist and lay
> readers.  There are novelists - Graham Greene wrote what he called
> 'entertainments' as well as his serious novels.  Some UK ministers have
> written polemical pieces and also fiction. Academics often write for learned
> journals and also popularize.  So it would be quite easy to test.
>
> First however, I shall try to master the basic tools.
>
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