Quantitative Analysis of Style in Mihai Eminescu's Poetry
Abstract
Quantitative stylistic methods aim to express certain aspects of a text in numeric form, thus allowing the introduction of fast, powerful and accurate computational approaches for analysis. While in the case of literature, the validity and usefulness of such studies is highly controversial, one cannot deny the opportunities brought forward by computational methods: first, the exploration of large sets of documents in search of patterns otherwise difficult to discover by human readers; second, the possibility of opening up new perspectives by uncovering latent features of texts. In this study, we investigate the poetic work of one of the most important Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu, through a variety of quantitative methods addressing lexical, morphological, semantic and emotional aspects of text. We propose a comparison between the results of the computational approach and established interpretations of Eminescu’s work in order to assess the viability of computational methods in poetic style studies.
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