The Language and Style of the Fragmentary Republican Historians

Briscoe, James R.

doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197263327.003.0003

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…We reasoned that markers of hypotactic style (extensive use of subordinate clauses) might be particularly important, because the earlier historians on whom Livy drew are generally held to have favored a simpler sentence structure (parataxis) in contrast to Livy's more varied and hierarchical syntax (60). Consistent with this hypothesis, we identified five features (mean sentence length, variance of sentence length, fraction of noninterrogative sentences containing at least one relative clause, mean length of relative clauses, and mean number of relative clauses per sentence) sufficient to establish a clear difference between citational and noncitational material (SI Appendix, Fig.…”

Section: Anomaly Detection Differentiates Suspected Citations From Othermentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative criticism of literary relationships

Dexter

Katz

Tripuraneni

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Authors often convey meaning by referring to or imitating prior works of literature, a process that creates complex networks of literary relationships ("intertextuality") and contributes to cultural evolution. In this paper, we use techniques from stylometry and machine learning to address subjective literary critical questions about Latin literature, a corpus marked by an extraordinary concentration of intertextuality. Our work, which we term "quantitative criticism," focuses on case studies involving two influential Roman authors, the playwright Seneca and the historian Livy. We find that four plays related to but distinct from Seneca's main writings are differentiated from the rest of the corpus by subtle but important stylistic features. We offer literary interpretations of the significance of these anomalies, providing quantitative data in support of hypotheses about the use of unusual formal features and the interplay between sound and meaning. The second part of the paper describes a machine-learning approach to the identification and analysis of citational material that Livy loosely appropriated from earlier sources. We extend our approach to map the stylistic topography of Latin prose, identifying the writings of Caesar and his near-contemporary Livy as an inflection point in the development of Latin prose style. In total, our results reflect the integration of computational and humanistic methods to investigate a diverse range of literary questions.authorship attribution | cultural evolution | intertextuality | machine learning | stylometry T he study of literature relies on mapping interactions between texts. Ancient Greek critics understood the tragedies of Aeschylus in part through their relation to Homeric epic, and ancient Roman commentators interpreted words and phrases in texts by citing parallels in other works. Much of literary criticism today rests on understanding these vast networks of intertextuality, which often have profound consequences for the meaning of both individual texts and larger groupings by genre or period (1). Through quantitative analysis of formal elements and their change over time, the study of intertextuality can shed light on the cultural evolution of literature (2).A central challenge in the study of intertextuality is its heterogeneous nature. Literary parallels differ widely in both similarity and scope (Fig. 1A). The relationship between the associated texts can range from obvious (direct quotation) to extremely subtle (artfully constructed indirect references, often referred to as allusions in literary study). Furthermore, parallels can operate on the level of individual words or phrases, short passages, or entire works and can involve verbal, syntactic, phonetic, or metrical features. As illustrated in Fig. 1A, intertexts can be of comparable similarity but very different scope; an adaptation of an entire work, for instance, can be thought of as a collection of many (local) allusions.In this paper, we focus on the quantitative characterization of intertextual rela...

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Section: Anomaly Detection Differentiates Suspected Citations From Othermentioning

confidence: 99%