Abstract
This chapter argues for more informed target metrics for the statistical processing of stylistic variation in text collections. Much as operationalized relevance proved a useful goal to strive for in information retrieval, research in textual stylistics, whether application oriented or philologically inclined, needs goals formulated in terms of pertinence, relevance, and utility—notions that agree with reader experience of text. Differences readers are aware of are mostly based on utility—not on textual characteristics per se. Mostly, readers report stylistic differences in terms of genres. Genres, while vague and undefined, are well-established and talked about: very early on, readers learn to distinguish genres. This chapter discusses variation given by genre, and contrasts it to variation occasioned by individual choice.
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Notes
- 1.
The “private” type of factual verb expresses intellectual states such as belief and intellectual acts such as discovery. These states and acts are “private” in the sense that they are not observable… Examples of such verbs are: accept, anticipate … fear, feel, … think, understand [11]. Opinion expression is counted by adverbials such as clearly, offend, specious, poor, excellent. and argument expression by counting argumentative operators such as if … then, else, almost.
- 2.
This experiment is reported in full in [7]. This section is an excerpt of that paper.
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Karlgren, J. (2010). Textual Stylistic Variation: Choices, Genres and Individuals. In: Argamon, S., Burns, K., Dubnov, S. (eds) The Structure of Style. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12337-5_6
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