Polyglot conspiracy - which is to be master? Language Log: The social psychology of linguistic naming and sha. Language Log. Language Log: Usage gripes as display of social capital. Language Log: An opportunity missed. The Lousy Linguist. Rare words 'author's fingerprint' Analyses of classic authors' works provide a way to "linguistically fingerprint" them, researchers say.
The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue. Analyses of works by Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and DH Lawrence showed these "unique word" charts are specific to each author. The work is published in the New Journal of Physics. Researchers also suggest each author pulls their works from a hypothetical "meta book". One description of this concept might be a framework for the way an author uses language. It is from this framework that all their works are ultimately derived. In 1935, the Harvard University linguist George Kingsley Zipf demonstrated a mathematical relationship between the frequency of a word in a text and its rank in the list of an author's most used words.
They have used a related approach that comes up with a unique identifier for each author. Hardy measure Source material. Geoffrey Nunberg - Counting Words. The I's Don't Have It Geoff Nunberg "Fresh Air" Commentary, November 17, 2009 The Internet turns everybody into a linguist, the same way it turns us all into medical diagnosticians and tracers of lost persons. Counting words has become a favorite way to track a trend, uncover a hidden meaning, or cut a long text down to size. So when the House Democrats' 1900-page healthcare bill was published, critics on all sides took to counting up its words, whether or not that actually meant anything. But a shall-count in the thousands isn't out of line for a major bill from either side of the aisle -- there are more than 2000 in the prescription drug bill the Republicans passed in 2003.
It's that same craze for counting that moves commentators to tally first-person pronouns when they want to demonstrate someone's narcissism. But nobody's pronouns have come in for as much critical scrutiny as Barack Obama's. Stanley Fish took up same motif in the New York Times. Languagehat.com. Evolving English II.