Method
Style
As
an addition to the classical toolkit of philology, the study of style
offers new possibilities.
There
is what you say; the content of your message. And there is how you say it. The
latter is what we call style. Stylistics has many aspects, but in perhaps its
purest form, it consists of the study, not of content words, the message carriers,
but of function words or connectives; the
words which articulate the content words. It is this top end of the lexicon, the
high-frequency connectives or particles, with which we are here concerned.
Mary
McCarthy once said, of her enemy Lillian Hellman, Every
word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."
This
is a witty remark. Its wit consists in the fact that "and" and "the"
are precisely the sort of high frequency connectives and function words we have
been talking about. These words do not carry the message; they articulate
the message. They cannot lie, for the same reason that they cannot tell the truth.
They operate below the level at which statements of any kind are made, and where
judgements of "true" or "false" can be made about those statements.
Bias. Personal judgements of style are open
to the charge of bias. The advantage of an objective measure is that it has
no bias. Anyone who does the counts and runs the arithmetic (by hand, by computer;
it does not matter), will get the same result. That result will be interpreted
by a human investigator, but the result itself is objective.
Our
test, called BIRD (the Brooks Index of Rhetorical
Difference), was developed over many years by Bruce and Taeko Brooks; first for
Queen Anne's English (with amusing results for some writings of Jonathan Swift),
then for literary Chinese. It has recently been adapted by Keith L Yoder for Biblical
and Homeric Greek, and for Biblical Hebrew.
Technica.
How does it work? Most modern stylistic methods assign a number to each of several
texts, and then compare the numbers. The BIRD test instead takes two passages
at a time, and considers, for each, the degree of departure of 14 high frequency
test words from what is expected on general principles. It then compares the resulting
stylistic profiles of the two texts to get D (for Difference), a measure
of the degree to which they depart in the same way from that expected norm.
If one text zigs where the other zigs, and zags where it zags, then they will
be considered to be closely similar, and will have a low
D number.
Interpretation
of the D Numbers. BIRD numbers fall into one of these four levels of
similarity:
Extreme:
D = 1.00 or more. Not the same author; a break
in continuity.
High: D = 0.75
~ 0.99. Another author, or the same one in a disturbed mood.
Normal:
D = 0.51 ~ 0.76. Consistent; could be chapters
in the same work.
Low: D = 0.50
or less. Continuous, or one passage has another "in mind."
An
advantage of this test is that, unlike some other methods, which require samples
of 10,000 or more words, BIRD works with smaller passages, the zone where most
questions of scholarly interest are located. As sample size decreases, the test
words gradually lose their power of discrimination. The minimum sample size varies
with the language in question. For classical Chinese, the lower limit, where the
test words cease to be functional, is 218 words; for Biblical Hebrew 88 words;
for Biblical Greek 105 words; and for Homeric Greek 90 words. As those lower limits
are approached, the risk of false positives increases. For safety, we recommend
a lower limit about three times as large: for Classical Chinese, 600 words, and
for Biblical Hebrew or Biblical or Homeric Greek, 300 words.
Proof.
Does it work? And how would we know? We suggest that if the results of a style
test tend to agree, over time, with what seem to be competent human opinions,
then the test itself gains credibility, and its results may also be considered
in adjudicating differences of scholarly opinion, on in the preliminary
assessment of a little studied text. Results so far suggest that the test results
are meaningful - that the test, within its limits, is seeing pretty much
what human investigators have seen. Here are two BIRD confirmations of ancient
opinions:
Homeric
Greek. Already in antiquity, Iliad 10, the Doloneia,
was suspected as an intrusion. The BIRD test reports that it is so unlike the
preceding Iliad 9 (the Embassy to Achilles) as to preclude its coming from the
same author, or even the same school of rhapsodes. It is indeed intrusive. The
Ancients were right.
- Biblical
Greek. Origen had suspected that Revelation
was wrongly associated with the Johannine group (the Gospel and three Epistles
of John). The BIRD results show that not only is this true, but that Revelation
resembles no other text in the NT canon, probably because it is written
in an archaizing, Scriptural style. Origen was right.
For
some BIRD results in Biblical Hebrew, with examples from the Old Testament, see
the Aurelia page. We
conclude with deep thanks to Keith Yoder,
who has made the BIRD test available for wider applications; and with our best
wishes to any investigators who may be disposed to include such results in their
own future researches. May our BIRD, like Noah's dove in an earlier day, help
to find where the firm ground lies, in the uncertain world outside.
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