Approaching Questions of Text Reuse in Ancient Greek Using Computational Syntactic Stylometry

• Authors: Vanessa B. Gorman , Robert J. Gorman
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

We are investigating methods by which data from dependency syntax treebanks of ancient Greek can be applied to questions of authorship in ancient Greek historiography. From the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank were constructed syntax words (sWords) by tracing the shortest path from each leaf node to the root for each sentence tree. This paper presents the results of a preliminary test of the usefulness of the sWord as a stylometric discriminator. The sWord data was subjected to clustering analysis. The resultant groupings were in accord with traditional classifications. The use of sWords also allows a more fine-grained heuristic exploration of difficult questions of text reuse. A comparison of relative frequencies of sWords in the directly transmitted Polybius book 1 and the excerpted books 9–10 indicate that the measurements of the two texts are generally very close, but when frequencies do vary, the differences are surprisingly large. These differences reveal that a certain syntactic simplification is a salient characteristic of Polybius’ excerptor, who leaves conspicuous syntactic indicators of his modifications.

Keywords

EN

dependency syntax treebanking; text reuse; Greek historiography

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2016-02-29

accepted

2016-10-14

online

2016-11-02

Contributors

author

Vanessa B. Gorman

• Dept. of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE United States

author

Robert J. Gorman

• Dept. of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opli-2016-0026