I repeat therefore I am: The parasyntactic perspective

Abstract

Abstract The text presents a theoretical platform and a case study of a new method for authorship attribution based on an author’s specific low-frequency lexicon. It will be shown that an author’s text is largely context-independent and is constructed by the author’s habit based on the regular repetition of certain topics or modes of expression. The author’s idiosyncratic way of choosing between synonymous linguistic devices in the text happens at a distance of several word forms or sentence units. This means that texts themselves are constructed using a much wider range of repetitions than expected and that the structure of the text above the level of intersentential linking is determined by a specific group of words (functional but above all content words) obligatorily used by the author in the formulation of the text. The newly introduced method can be used to attribute authorship by relying on the specific linguistic imprint of the author in the text (in this context, we talk about parasyntactic linguistic level). The method is compared with a function-word-based method.