Quantitative Research into Narrative
玄 土山 · Advances in linguistics and communication studies · 2016
Stylometry is the application of quantitative analysis, primarily to written language, to identify variations in style. Statistical analysis of linguistic characteristics is applied to identify authorship, creation period, and creation order. This study involves stylometric research into “The Tale of Genji,” which is a Japanese classical literary work. “The Tale of Genji” is a long story consisting of 54 volumes. However, in the last 13 volumes, the content is different from that in the other volumes, and the writing quality differs from that of the previous 41 volumes; thus, it has long been theorized that the 13 volumes was written by a different author. The result of an analysis using the word frequency for auxiliary verbs found no evidence that positively support the theory of separate authorship. Therefore, the results indicate that the possibility that there are multiple authors of “The Tale of Genji” is low.