Javier Calle Martín

Function Words in Authorship Attribution Studies

The search for a reliable expression to measure an authors lexical richness has constituted many statisticians holy grail over the last decades in their attempt to solve some controversial authorship attributions. The greatest effort has been devoted to find a formula grounded on the computation of tokens, word-types, most-frequent-word(s), hapax legomena, hapax dislegomena, etc., such that it would characterize a text successfully, independent of its length. In this line, Yules K and Zipf s Z seem to be generally accepted by scholars as reliable measures of lexical repetition and lexical richness by computing content and function words altogether. 1 Given the latters higher frequency, they prove to be more reliable identifiers when isolatedly computed in p.c.a. and Delta-based attribution studies, and their rate to the former also measures the functional density of a text. In this paper, we aim to show that each constant serves to measure a specific feature and, as such, they are thought to complement one another since a supposedly rich text (in terms of its lemmas) does necessarily have to characterize by its low functional density, and vice versa. For this purpose, an annotated corpus of the West Saxon Gospels (WSG) and Apollonius of Tyre (AoT) has been used along with a huge raw corpus.

The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer

This paper presents the Old English Concordancer (OEC), a new tool to process an annotated corpus of Old English, which goes beyond the prototypical operations of similar programmes (lists, indexes, concordances, statistical information, queries, etc). Since annotation includes also lemmatisation and tagging, OEC can perform all those tasks not only with words but also with lemmas, and can solve any morphological query successfully, regardless of its complexity, by means of Boolean filters. It allows some simple syntactical research at sentence level as well, as it is sensitive to context and word-order. Moreover, the statistical information that the OEC generates includes absolute and relative values of items, as well as their distribution by words, lemmas, class and/or accidence [inflection], vocabulary profiles, etc. The OEC has been applied to an annotated version of The Old English Apollonius of Tyre, and some of the results that can be obtained are presented, along with others that can be indirectly derived from them.

Aspects of punctuation in the Old English "Apollonius of Tyre"

Abstract 1. Introduction The punctuation system of mediaeval manuscripts can be compared to the experience of using a new software application. When confronted with scribal punctuation for the first time, it is as if you had the intimidating commands of the menu bar in front of you, waiting for a mouse click. In the case of punctuation marks, one cannot help but look at them with a bewildered glance and wonder about the kinds of pauses that they signal, or even try to find some sort of coherence within the set of symbols at hand. This has been precisely the general contention until late in the 20th century, before which time scribal punctuation had been neglected in the assumption that it was meaningless and haphazard, scattered at random through the folios of the manuscript (Jenkinson 1926: 154; Denholm-Young 1954: 77; Zeeman 1956: 11-18; Heyworth 1981: 139-140). In this vein, Parkes argued that the apparent chaos of most manuscripts is just a scribal convention whereby “scribes and correctors punctuate where confusion is likely to arise and do not always punctuate where confusion is not likely to arise” (Parkes 1978: 138-139).