Studies in authorship recognition - a corpus-based approach

This study in authorship recognition takes as its starting point the intuitive capacity of readers to recognise authors under certain circumstances. Making use of corpus- and computerlinguistic methods and statistical procedures, the study shows that intuitive stylistic findings can in many cases be corroborated by empirical data. Ideally, the intuitive and the empirical approaches to style should be understood as complementing each other rather than as mutually exclusive concepts.
The notion of style that emerges from this study is that of a number of basic decisions made by the author of a text, from which the remaining discriminatory linguistic characteristics of that text, choices, are derived.