Morphosyntactic Annotation in Literary Stylometry

Abstract

This article investigates the stylometric usefulness of morphosyntactic annotation. Focusing on the style of literary texts, it argues that including morphosyntactic annotation in analyses of style has at least two important advantages: (1) maintaining a topic agnostic approach and (2) providing input variables that are interpretable in traditional grammatical terms. This study demonstrates how widely available Universal Dependency parsers can generate useful morphological and syntactic data for texts in a range of languages. These data can serve as the basis for input features that are strongly informative about the style of individual novels, as indicated by accuracy in classification tests. The interpretability of such features is demonstrated by a discussion of the weakness of an “authorial” signal as opposed to the clear distinction among individual works.