Who Wrote the Epistle, God Only Knows : A Statistical Authorial Analysis of Hebrews in Comparison with Pauline and Lukan Literature

The authorship of Hebrews has been a point of contention for scholars for the past two millennia. While the epistle is traditionally attributed to Paul, many scholars assert that it carries thematic, structural, and stylistic differences from the remainder of his extant epistles; therefore, many other possible authors have been proposed. Of these, only Luke has other New Testament writings. Therefore, this project conducts a statistical comparison of Hebrews to the Pauline and Lukan corpora using stylometric authorial analysis methods. This analysis demonstrates that Hebrews is stylistically closer to Lukan literature than Pauline (but not to a significant degree), and thus concludes that Luke is a possible but not definite author (or possibly a co-author)

Stylistic Fingerprints, POS-tags and Inflected Languages: A Case Study in Polish

In stylometric investigations, frequencies of the most frequent words (MFWs) and character n-grams outperform other style-markers, even if their performance varies significantly across languages. In inflected languages, word endings play a prominent role, and hence different word forms cannot be recognized using generic text tokenization. Countless inflected word forms make frequencies sparse, making most statistical procedures complicated. Presumably, applying one of the NLP techniques, such as lemmatization and/or parsing, might increase the performance of classification. The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of grammatical features (as assessed via POS-tag n-grams) and lemmatized forms in recognizing authorial profiles, in order to address the underlying issue of the degree of freedom of choice within lexis and grammar. Using a corpus of Polish novels, we performed a series of supervised authorship attribution benchmarks, in order to compare the classification accuracy for different types of lexical and syntactic style-markers. Even if the performance of POS-tags as well as lemmatized forms was notoriously worse than that of lexical markers, the difference was not substantial and never exceeded ca. 15%

Book Reviews and the Consolidation of Genre

Some literary scholars have claimed that predictive models can measure the strength of the boundaries that separate different cultural categories—genres, for instance, or market segments. But interpreting textual models as evidence about the strength of a cultural distinction has seemed a questionable move to many readers. We use book reviews to test this inference. Are the similarities between fictional texts purely verbal phenomena, or do they reflect social categories that are also legible (although expressed differently) in readers' responses to those texts? We find that the subject and genre categories most strongly marked in fictional texts are also the categories most strongly marked in reviews of fiction. The correlation is strong; r > .8

Deconstructing the Authorship of Siempre ayuda la verdad: A Play by Lope de Vega?

[EN]In this article I focus on the authorship of Siempre ayuda la verdad, an early modern Spanish play first published in 1635 as part of the volume Segunda parte de las comedias del maestro Tirso de Molina. This drama, which is one of several early modern Iberian plays related to the figure of Inês de Castro, is currently considered by most scholars as penned by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, probably in collaboration with Luis de Belmonte and maybe even with Tirso de Molina. In the first part of this paper I will examine how this traditional attribution relies on a bibliographic ghost, subjective impressions of style, and the creation of a scholarly discourse based on the repetition of statements—including some explicitly made up—without any critical examination of facts. The possible attribution of this play to none other than Lope de Vega—a name that has been associated with Siempre ayuda la verdad since 1906—has not received specific examination until now. I will proceed to do so in the second part of this paper by using a variety of resources that offer objective criteria: early modern documentation, strophic versification, stylometry, and orthoepy.MICINN; Agencia Estatal de Investigación; European Social Fun

Hedges and Boosters in 19th century British Fiction

Hedges and boosters are two important sources of linguistic devices to express tentative evaluations and to mitigate solidarity with readers. Men and women have different tendencies of using these linguistic devices. Women are usually considered to follow a personal and polite style whereas men are more competitive and assertive. Hence, gender-preferential features of women and men are one of the prerequisites of understanding the functions of hedges and boosters. One relatively neglected aspect of gender-based studies of these linguistic devices is fiction. In this paper, we explored male and female English writers' use of hedges and boosters in HUM19UK Corpus, a corpus of 19th century British fiction. We calculated a statistically significant overuse in the deployment of hedges and boosters by female writers in the 19th century, which is an indication of a new writing style adapted by the female writers in that era. However, the most common items of hedges and boosters were identical in both corpora

Gutenberg goes neural : comparing features of Dutch human translations with raw neural machine translation outputs in a corpus of English literary classics

Due to the growing success of neural machine translation (NMT), many have started to question its applicability within the field of literary translation. In order to grasp the possibilities of NMT, we studied the output of the neural machine system of Google Translate (GNMT) and DeepL when applied to four classic novels translated from English into Dutch. The quality of the NMT systems is discussed by focusing on manual annotations, and we also employed various metrics in order to get an insight into lexical richness, local cohesion, syntactic, and stylistic difference. Firstly, we discovered that a large proportion of the translated sentences contained errors. We also observed a lower level of lexical richness and local cohesion in the NMTs compared to the human translations. In addition, NMTs are more likely to follow the syntactic structure of a source sentence, whereas human translations can differ. Lastly, the human translations deviate from the machine translations in style

Romances teatrales entre Mira de Amescua, Calderón y Lope, ritmo, asonancia y cuestiones de autoría

Departing from doubts about the authorship of El divino Jasón, the article examines the paternity of two autos sacramentales with complementary stylometric approaches. Firstly, an initial round of traditional token-based tests was run. Then, the texts were classified according to the metrical features of their romances. The tests of both approaches attributed El divino Jasón to Mira de Amescua whilst they classified La universal redenciónamong Lope de Vega's work. Hence, the author seems to leave a footprint in their octosyllables' rhythmic patterns, resembling those revealed by classic stylometric methods. So, together with the contribution to forensic linguistics, this article presents a new method for studying sound-related aspects of the Spanish Golden Age plays.Partiendo de dudas acerca de la autoría de El divino Jasón, el artículo examina la paternidad de dos autos sacramentales con aproximaciones estilométricas complementarias. En primer lugar, se realizó una ronda inicial de pruebas estilométricas tradicionales basadas en tokens. Seguidamente, se clasificaron los textos de acuerdo a las características métricas de sus romances. Las pruebas de ambas aproximaciones asociaron El divino Jasón con Mira de Amescua, mientras que clasificaron La universal redención entre las obras de Lope de Vega. Por lo tanto, el autor parece imprimir en los patrones rítmicos de sus octosílabos una huella semejante a las que revelan los métodos estilométricos clásicos. De esta manera, junto a la contribución a la lingüística forense, este artículo presenta un nuevo método para el estudio de los aspectos sonoros del teatro aurisecular