Austen by the numbers
From Strange But True.
Word frequency analysis showed “significant difference” between the two writers, says David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. One method is to list the 50 commonest words in all available texts of each author, then to compare the results. You might think an author’s unusual pet words would be the tipoff, but frequency of bread-and-butter words like “to” and “with” are generally more revealing, says Erica Klarreich in Bookish Math in Science News Online.
These frequencies are unconscious and so make good literary “fingerprints.” For instance, in a famous dispute over whether Alexander Hamilton or James Madison wrote certain of the Federalist Papers, analysts studied the men’s other writings and found Hamilton used the word “upon” about 10 times as often as Madison.
“They assigned all 12 papers to Madison, concurring with the historians’ prevailing view.” When novels by Jane Austen and Henry James were compared, the number of he’s and him’s stood out in James’ work, says Crystal, they’s and them’s in Austen’s. James was also fond of using the indefinite article “a” and “an.”
Cool!
