A quantitative style analysis of four Turkish authors: changes over time, and differences

Abstract

We present a stylometric analysis of the writings of four famous Turkish authors: Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Refik Halid Karay, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil. Our aim is to internally analyse the shifts in their writing styles and examine the differences between them. First, we evaluate the changes in word lengths in the writers’ novels over time and observe that they do not necessarily follow the pattern of writing with longer words as time passes, which was common for 20th-century Turkish literature. We then employ a sliding text window approach to capture the shift in writing styles in novels, by focusing changes in word lengths throughout the entire text. Based on this analysis, we hypothesize a relationship between changes in word lengths and meaning shift within a novel. Next, we investigate the stylochronometry and authorship attribution problems for these four authors and show that their styles change with time and that their works are distinguishable from each other. Finally, we analyse differences in their vocabulary richness within close contexts and demonstrate a strong relationship between poetic writing and lower vocabulary richness in the running text.