A Stylometric Analysis of Iranian Poets

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation into the extent to which the lexical choices made by different poets are distinctive. When a writer, writes, s/he makes lexical choices that make them different from other writers and the writing to some extent can be considered as their fingerprint or in the other word their signature. Authorship analysis by means of textual measurements has been the interest of so many linguists. Authors have their own styles and the stylometrist is interested in finding units which can distinct authors from each other. Statistical analysis has provided different tools for this attempt, by different scholars. Over the past 3 centuries many types of textual tools has been introduced to discriminate different authors objectively that developing in computer programing has played the important role for using these models. In this study by writing a computer program, the styles of different Iranian poets, Attar and Molavi, and Nezami, are investigated in terms of their word length and word richness. Result shows differences between their styles in terms of these parameters. This way of analyzing writing of different authors has some implications in different field of sociolinguistic and TOEFL.