Studying the History of Early English

Horobin, Simon

doi:10.1007/978-1-137-04051-0

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…To further put the results into perspective, Early Modern English began around the sixteenth century when vocabulary expanded at its greatest rate, and it is much closer to today's language than that of Old or Middle English (Horobin, 2010 ). By this time pronouns, they, their, them had become firmly established in the standard language, such as most personal pronouns that have maintained number, case, and gender throughout the history of English.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It should be noted that Shakespeare's Early Modern English is much closer to today's language than that of Old or Middle English and most personal pronouns have maintained number, case, and gender throughout the history of English (Horobin, 2010 ). However, its only came into print in 1598, and his was a neuter possessive where today we would use its , noting that Shakespeare's First Folio, printed in 1623, kept the earlier form of his (Nevalainen, 2006 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Using Shakespeare's Sotto Voce to Determine True Identity From Text

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Little is known of the private life of William Shakespeare, but he is famous for his collection of plays and poems, even though many of the works attributed to him were published anonymously. Determining the identity of Shakespeare has fascinated scholars for 400 years, and four significant figures in English literary history have been suggested as likely alternatives to Shakespeare for some disputed works: Bacon, de Vere, Stanley, and Marlowe. A myriad of computational and statistical tools and techniques have been used to determine the true authorship of his works. Many of these techniques rely on basic statistical correlations, word counts, collocated word groups, or keyword density, but no one method has been decided on. We suggest that an alternative technique that uses word semantics to draw on personality can provide an accurate profile of a person. To test this claim, we analyse the works of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Elizabeth Cary. We use Word Accumulation Curves, Hierarchical Clustering overlays, Principal Component Analysis, and Linear Discriminant Analysis techniques in combination with RPAS, a multi-faceted text analysis approach that draws on a writer's personality, or self to identify subtle characteristics within a person's writing style. Here we find that RPAS can separate the known authored works of Shakespeare from Marlowe and Cary. Further, it separates their contested works, works suspected of being written by others. While few authorship identification techniques identify self from the way a person writes, we demonstrate that these stylistic characteristics are as applicable 400 years ago as they are today and have the potential to be used within cyberspace for law enforcement purposes.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%