Mining the Differences between Penninc and Vostaert
Karina van Dalen-Oskam
karina.van.dalen@niwi.knaw.nl
Dept. Dutch Linguistics and Literary Studies
Joris van Zundert
joris.van.zundert@niwi.knaw.nl
Dept. Dutch Linguistics and Literary Studies
The Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein (Romance of Gauvain, ca. 1260) was written by two authors, Penninc and Vostaert. Only one manuscript containing the complete text, explicitly dated as copied in the year 1350, is left to us. Some fragments of another, probably somewhat younger manuscript contain about 400 lines. The text in the complete manuscript consists of 11,202 lines of rhyming verse. The manuscript was written by two clerks. The first seems to have written the lines 1-5.781 and the second the lines 5,782-11,202.
The second author, Vostaert, explicitly claims to have added about 3,300 lines to Penninc's text. Because scholars of Middle Dutch literature came up with other amounts, we decided to try out modern authorship attribution techniques to find out whether these would point to a specific line in the text where the text before and the text after contrasts most. We used a lexical richness measure, Udney Yule's Characteristic K, and Burrows's Delta, measuring the differences of frequencies of the most frequent words in different parts of the text. We split the text into largely overlapping parts of 2000 lines, moving through the text in order to search for an exact line in the text where the contrast before and after would be the most significant. For measuring Burrows's Delta this meant that for the sake of our focus on one text (or two, in a way), we considered the text as a group of texts' and every part' of 2000 lines as a separate text, to be compared with the other 'texts'.
[Figure 1: Lexical Richness according to Yule's K.]
At the conference in Gothenburg in 2004 we were able to show that both measures yielded the lines 7,881-2 as the point of the most contrast. In Fig. 1 we present the results of Yule's K for that part of the text and in Fig. 2 the results of our creative use of Burrows's Delta can be found. It is very intriguing that both measurements point to the same place in the text. This suggests that line 7,882 could very well be the place where Vostaert took over from Penninc.
[Figure 2: Differences in frequencies of the 150 most frequent words according to Burrows's Delta]
We continue our research by concentrating on a quantitative analysis of the differences between the two parts of the text. What are in fact the lexical differences between the text parts before and after line 7,881-2? To find out, we made a list of lemmata (headwords, comprising all spelling variants or inflections etc. of a word) that occur significantly more in the lines before and in the lines after. The top of this list looks as follows:
stdev
>0.05242999
mean0.0166Pennincz-scorebe, his
zijn
0.841315.7293I
ik
0.8042
15.0217
me
mij
0.6790
12.6328
you
gij
0.5059
9.3325
my, mine
mijn
0.4223
7.7364
may
mogen
0.3158
5.7060
it
het
0.2957
5.3222
stand
staan
0.2665
4.7663
we
wij
0.2514
4.4775
lord
heer
0.2328
4.1224
that
dat
0.2195
3.8692
yonder
gene
0.2137
3.7587
your
uw
0.2131
3.7465
you
u
0.2095
3.6793
say
zeggen
0.2022
3.5387
god
god
0.1903
3.3124
live
leven
0.1774
3.0663
come
komen
0.1702
2.9290
need
moeten
0.1653
2.8359
gate
poort
0.1650
2.8300
see
zien
0.1599
2.7316
squire
knaap
0.1524
2.5898
then
doe
0.1485
2.5157
give
geven
0.1485
2.5150
well, rather
wel
0.1479
2.5043
over
over
0.1474
2.4931
king
koning
0.1454
2.4555
thus
dus
0.1396
2.3445
stay
blijven
0.1392
2.3375
inside
binnen
0.1267
2.0992
not
ne
0.1229
2.0275
at
aan
0.1147
1.8707
shall
zullen
0.1038
1.6623
you
jij
0.1034
1.6550
loyal
trouw
0.1011
1.6111
go
gaan
0.1009
1.6075
serpent
serpent
0.0958
1.5093
allow
laten
0.0954
1.5030
desire
begeren
0.0915
1.4280
day
dag
0.0878
1.3569
where
waar
0.0821
1.2481
all
al
0.0807
1.2211
stdev
0.03920838
mean0.0167Vostaertz-scorethe, this
die
0.6234
15.4755
he
hij
0.4112
10.0614
to
te
0.3670
8.9353
knight
ridder
0.3659
8.9071
large
groot
0.3406
8.2613
duke
hertog
0.3051
7.3573
very, pain
zeer
0.2951
7.1002
they, she
zij
0.2886
6.9355
Walewein
walewein
0.2823
6.7757
there
daar
0.2748
6.5846
so, thus
zo
0.2260
5.3397
of
van
0.2242
5.2924
Isabele
isabele
0.1844
4.2767
maiden
jonkvrouw
0.1813
4.1977
hit, slay
slaan
0.1607
3.6728
in
in
0.1382
3.0998
horse
hors
0.1349
3.0160
how
hoe
0.1348
3.0117
self
zelf
0.1334
2.9774
other
ander
0.1330
2.9662
fox
vos
0.1228
2.7068
no
geen
0.1196
2.6245
to
toe
0.1171
2.5612
man
man
0.1131
2.4601
many
menig
0.1074
2.3153
black
zwart
0.1023
2.1845
also
ook
0.0985
2.0859
begin
beginnen
0.0980
2.0739
because
want
0.0969
2.0465
brave
stout
0.0961
2.0252
speak
spreken
0.0957
2.0155
to
tot
0.0942
1.9779
helmet
helm
0.0925
1.9352
(some)one
men
0.0918
1.9169
sweet
lief
0.0912
1.9009
on
op
0.0910
1.8953
blood
bloed
0.0884
1.8290
and
en
0.0873
1.8027
walk
lopen
0.0852
1.7485
merciful
goedertieren
0.0820
1.6672
hour
stonde
0.0812
1.6466
do
doen
0.0804
1.6262
[etc.]
Summarizing, Penninc makes significantly more use of the first and second person of the personal pronoun, in contrast to a significantly higher use of the third person by Vostaert. Penninc also applies a lot more modal verbs. But why? Are there several reasons for these differences, or can all be explained by only one or two special effects' of the individual authors?
The first hypothesis we will explore is that a difference in the amount of dialogue between the two parts of the text may give rise to several of the differences we have found. The paper will investigate whether this is the case. We will present an analysis of the vocabulary of both authors differentiating between dialogue, narrator's text, and erlebte Rede' (narrated monologue). We will also list other possibly differentiating elements and test whether these play a part in the contrast we discovered by using Yule's K and Burrows's Delta. This qualitative phase in the research is meant to yield an overview of elements contributing to the (quantitative) contrast on the one hand, and to lead us to a list of key elements in the lexicon of the two authors on the other. The list of actual differences will be the input for a new quantitative and qualitative literary analysis of the character and voice of Penninc and Vostaert. Furthermore, we will look forward to the next purely quantitative step we hope to take, in which the results of the above can help us to establish a formula for authorship distinction in the genre of Middle Dutch Arthurian Romance, and help us, so to speak, to leap from the mining to the modelling of the differences.
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2002
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