Visualizing the development of prose styles in Horse Manuals from Early Modern English to Present-Day English

Thijs Lubbers , Bettelou Los (1)

1 Edin. - University of Edinburgh

This paper offers a data-driven analysis of the development of English prose styles in a single genre (instructive writing) dealing with a single topic (the correct way of feeding a horse) in 13 texts with publication dates ranging between 1565 to 2009. The texts are subjected to three investigations that offer visualizations of the findings: (i) a correspondence analysis of POS-tag trigrams; (ii) an association plot analysis; (iii) hierarchical clustering (dendrograms). As the period selected – Early Modern English to Present-Day English – does not involve any major changes in English syntax, we expect to find developments that are predominantly stylistic.

Mots clés: historical corpora; text analysis; stylistics; correspondence analysis; stylometry; n-grams; visualization techniques

Domaines: Linguistique; Linguistique

Thijs Lubbers, Bettelou Los. Visualizing the development of prose styles in Horse Manuals from Early Modern English to Present-Day English. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, 2020, Special Issue Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, Special issue on Visualisations in Historical Linguistics, pp.1-33. ⟨10.46298/jdmdh.5756⟩. ⟨hal-02283138v2⟩