Semantic Variation in Idiolect and Sociolect: Corpus Linguistic Evidence from Literary Texts

Abstract

Idiolects are person-dependent similarities in language use. They imply that texts by one author show more similarities in language use than texts between authors. Sociolects, on the other hand, are group-dependent similarities in language use. They imply that texts by a group of authors, for instance in terms of gender or time period, share more similarities within a group than between groups. Although idiolects and sociolects are commonly used terms in the humanities, they have not been investigated a great deal from corpus and computational linguistic points of view. To test several idiolect and sociolect hypotheses a factorial combination was used of time period (Modernism, Realism), gender of author (male, female) and author (Eliot, Dickens, Woolf, Joyce) totaling 16 corresponding literary texts. In a series of corpus linguistic studies using Boolean and vector models, no conclusive evidence was found for the selected idiolect and sociolect hypotheses. In final analyses testing the semantics within each literary text, this lack of evidence was explained by the low homogeneity within a literary text.