From Stage to Page: Stylistic Variation in Fictional Speech

Artjoms, Sela and Ben, Nagy and Joanna, Byszuk and Laura, Hernández-Lorenzo and Szemes, Botond and Maciej, Eder (2024) From Stage to Page: Stylistic Variation in Fictional Speech. In: Computational Drama Analysis. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 149-167. ISBN 9783111071824

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Abstract

Stylometry is mostly applied to authorial style. More recently, researchers have begun investigating the style of characters, nding that, although there is detectable stylistic variation, the variation remains within authorial bounds. In this article, we address the stylistic distinctiveness of characters in drama. Our primary contribution is methodological; we introduce and evaluate two non-parametric methods to produce a summary statistic for character distinctiveness that can be usefully applied and compared across languages and times. This is a signi cant advance previous approaches have either been based on pairwise similarities (which cannot be easily compared) or indirect methods that attempt to infer distinctiveness using classi cation accuracy. Our rst method is based on bootstrap distances between 3-gram probability distributions, the second (reminiscent of `unmasking techniques) on word keyness curves. Both methods are validated and explored by applying them to a reasonably large corpus (a subset of DraCor): we analyse 3301 characters drawn from 2324 works, covering ve centuries and four languages (French, German, Russian, and the works of Shakespeare). Both methods appear useful; the 3-gram method is statistically more powerful but the word keyness method o ers rich interpretability. Both methods are able to capture phonological di erences such as accent or dialect, as well as broad di erences in topic and lexical richness. Based on exploratory analysis, we nd that smaller characters tend to be more distinctive, and that women are cross-linguistically more distinctive than men, with this latter nding carefully interrogated using multiple regression. This greater distinctiveness stems from a historical tendency for female characters to be restricted to an `internal narrative domain covering mainly direct discourse and family/romantic themes. It is hoped that direct, comparable statistical measures will form a basis for more sophisticated future studies, and advances in theory.

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