King John and Henry V as Anomalies
Thomas Merriam · Notes and Queries · 2011
THE aim of stylistic authorship analysis is the determination and analysis of quantitative language features which effectively constitute author invariants. One of the explored approaches is that which makes use of separate common words in English which are frequent and are relatively independent of subject matter, genre or time of composition—the so-called function words. The forty most frequent words of Shakespeare’s First Folio in descending order of frequency are the function words—the, and, I, to, of, a, you, my, that, in, is, not, me, it, for, with, be, your, this, his, he, but, have, as, thou, him, will, so, what, thy, no, her, do, by, all, shall, if, are, we, thee. The forty word types together constitute two-fifths of the word tokens used by Shakespeare. Function words are prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, grammatical articles or particles, differentiated from lexical or content words which are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs. Function words form a limited or closed class of some two hundred types, and their high frequency favours their appearance in most texts, as opposed to the low frequency of individual lexical words that belong to the open class of word types.