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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• historical corpora
• text analysis
• stylistics
• correspondence analysis
• stylometry
• n-grams
• visualization techniques
• [shs.langue]humanities and social sciences/linguistics
• [scco.ling]cognitive science/linguistics