Stylometric investigation of 19th-century English through text-mining

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This grant-in-aid study has tried applying the state-of-art data-minig tools in stylistic investigation of nineteenth-century English prose. The linguistic features analysed in this research range from very common function words through mid- to lower-frequency items. While nineteenth-centurry English shares, in principle, similar linguistic features with eighteenth-century English as well as English in the early twentieth-century, it has proved to be possible to clearly differentiate nineteenth-century texts from texts written in the eighteenth as well as in the early twentieth centuries using machine learning techniques. Major distinguishing variables extracted though machine-learning mining algorithms include body-part languages, which function as descriptors of emotion or as device for characterisation. Of further interest is that Charles Dickens triggered the significant development of such stylistic devices in the nineteenth century.