Quantifying the Vicissitude of Fitzgeralds Creativity a Statistical Analysis Based on Lexical Measures
Traditionally, the critical evaluation of a writers creativity depends heavily on the critics taste. However, this qualitative criticism is subjective, for it does not take the texts intrinsic characteristics into account The power law distribution in different lexical texts has been discovered widely by the study on computational linguistics, which provides a statistical method for quantifying the intrinsic characteristics of literary texts. In this condition, Scott Fitzgeralds four novels are taken as examples to analyze statistically their lexical measures, such as the type token ratio, vocabulary growth rate and relative entropy. And a new measure is put forward to calculate the writers creativity, with which a new means to make a minute comparison of his creativitys variation is also proposed. The experimental analysis of Fitzgeralds novels demonstrates that this measure can not only corroborate the existing critical opinions, but also portray the vicissitude of a writers creative ability effectively. And the omnipresence of power law makes us deem that the method proposed in this paper can be applied to studying other famous writers creativity and his works literary reputation.
Fitzgerald Lexical measures Type token ratio Power law Creativity
Liu Haiyan Yin Xiaohu
School of Languages and Cultures Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology Nanjing, Chi Unit 72465,PLA Jinan, China
国际会议
重庆
英文
123-127
2011-08-20（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）