style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 117
Register, Method, and Pseudonymity Interpretations
for now, i define register very broadly as contexts for language variet-
ies ranging from literary genres to social situations. So audience design
(see below) would be one dimension of register impacting style varia-
tion within an author. Several studies indicate that genre likewise results
in style-shifts. as harald Baayen, hans Vanhalteren, and fiona tweedie
recognize:
it is well-known that not only differences between authors, but also differ-
ences in register or text type are reflected in the relative frequencies of lin-
guistic variables, many of which are syntactic in nature (Biber, 1995). Before
considering questions of authorship, we therefore need to have some idea
of the range of variation in the use of language for one author writing in
different registers, and for different authors writing in the same register
[emphasis mine].11
these kinds of studies lead david hoover to conclude, “in an authorship
attribution problem, texts as different as narrative and dialogue would
normally be avoided; genre differences are typically great enough to over-
whelm the subtler differences between authors’ style.”12 So, for example,
both hoover and halliday have argued for single authorship of golding’s
The Inheritors in spite of the radical language shifting in the final chapter,
given a shift in narrative point of view.13
unlike most pseudonymity interpretations, much of the work on
authorship attribution in contemporary statistical and computational
linguistics is careful to calibrate the role of register influences. for exam-
ple, some studies in authorship discrimination (where we know who the
author is and attempt to identify that author in a corpus by linguistic
analysis) demonstrate very clearly that authorship attribution remains dif-
ficult, even within larger corpus sizes of the same register (e.g., political)
and often cannot be accomplished with precision or complete accuracy.14
often times, if the investigator can narrow the sample selection from an
author down not only to the same register, but also, the exact same topic
11 harald Baayen, hans Vanhalteren, and fiona tweedie, “outside the cave of Shadows:
using Syntactic annotation to enhance authorship attribution,” LLC 11 (1996): 121–22.
12 david l. hoover, “multivariate analysis and the Study of Style Variation,” LLC 18
(2003): 342.
13 hoover, “multivariate analysis,” 342–43, 46–50.
14 george tambouratzis et al., “discriminating the registers and Styles in the modern
greek language—Part 1: diglossia in Stylistic analysis,” LLC 19 (2004): 197–220; george
tambouratzis et al., “discriminating the registers and Styles in the modern greek
language—Part 2: diglossia in Stylistic analysis,” LLC 19 (2004): 221–42.