A Stylometric Analysis of Yaşar Kemal’s İnce Memed Tetralogy

Abstract

We analyze four İnce Memed novels of Yaşar Kemal using six style markers: “most frequent words,” “syllable counts,” “word type – or part of speech – information,” “sentence length in terms of words,” “word length in text,” and “word length in vocabulary.” For analysis we divide each novel into five thousand word text blocks and count the frequencies of each style marker in these blocks. The style markers showing the best separation are “most frequent words” and “sentence lengths.” We use stepwise discriminant analysis to determine the best discriminators of each style marker. We then use these markers in cross validation based discriminant analysis. Further investigation based on multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) reveals how the attributes of each style marker group distinguish among the volumes.