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Part of
Norms and Conventions in the History of English
Edited by Birte Bös and Claudia Claridge
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 347] 2019
► pp. 149–166

Testing a stylometric tool in the study of Middle English documentary texts

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This article is about testing Stylo, a stylometric script for R, in the study of Middle English documents. The main aim of the paper is to be able to discriminate between Middle English documents and document groups with the help of an automatic classification script. The basic assumption is that stylometric tools, and Stylo in particular, may provide new insights into affinity between Middle English texts. In other words, stylometric tools in general help to identify text groups the members of which have something in common in their parentage; Stylo for R is no exception in this.

Keywords: stylometry, Middle English, corpus linguistics, unsupervised analysis, spelling variation, genre, text categories, documents
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1N-grams in the analysis of Middle English
  • 3.Material: A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Stylo and Middle English
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1One genre: Letters in MELD
    • 5.2Two genres: Letters and wills
    • 5.3Several genres simultaneously
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 May 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.347.08mak
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