Joaquin's Joaquinesquerie, Joaquinesquerie's Joaquin: A Statistical Expression of a Filipino Writer's Style
José Binongo · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 1994
The Filipino writer notorious for his flair for hyper-complex sentence constructions now writes in a manner which can be appreciated even by students in late elementary school. Computer-assisted experiments on Nick Joaquin's Tropical Gothic (which constitutes a representative anthology of his short fiction) and Joaquinesquerie (which is his most recent compilation) have confirmed the significant differences between the two collections. Given these wide stylistic differences, this paper explores whether or not it is possible to extract similarities in writing style between the contents of Joaquinesquerie and Tropical Gothic. The results of this study suggests that such stylistic parameters as vocabulary richness, which depend greatly on a writer‘s style which in turn may depend on the date of composition, genre, or intended audience, can blur stylometric investigations on writers with varying style. However, an eigenanalysis of highest frequency words links the Joaquinesquerie children's stories with the more difficult stories written decades earlier, suggesting that this multivariate statistical technique is sufficiently robust to discriminate between authors whose works are perceived to have been written in different styles.