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. Bibliography Burrows, J. 'Delta': a Measure of Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship Literary and Linguistic Computing 17 267-287 2002 Burrows, J. Questions of Authorship: Attribution and Beyond Computers and the Humanities 37 5-32 2003 Es, G.A. van De jeeste van Walewein en het schaakbord van Penninc en Pieter Vostaert Zwolle 19572 vols Holmes, D.I. Authorship Attribution Computers and the Humanities 28 87-106 1994 Johnson, D.F. Claassens, G.H.M. Dutch Romances I: Roman van WaleweinTrans. Johnson, D.F. Claassens, G.H.M. Cambridge Cambridge 2000 Love, Harold Attributing Authorship: An Introduction Cambridge Cambridge 2002