Quantifying the vicissitude of Fitzgerald's creativity a statistical analysis based on lexical measures

摘要

Traditionally, the critical evaluation of a writer's creativity depends heavily on the critic's taste. However, this qualitative criticism is subjective, for it does not take the text' s intrinsic characteristics in to account. The power law distribution in different lexical texts has been discovered widely by the study on computational linguistics, which provides a statistical method for quantifying the intrinsic characteristics of literary texts. In this condition, Scott Fitzgerald's four novels are taken a s examples to analyze statistically their lexical measures, such as the type token ratio, vocabulary growth rate and relative entropy. And a new measure is put forward to calculate the writer's creativity, with which a new means to make a minute comparison of his creativity's variation is also proposed. The experimental analysis of Fitzgerald's novels demonstrates that this measure can not only corroborate the existing critical o pinions, but also portray the vicissitude of a writer's creative ability effectively. And the omnipresence of power law makes us deem that the method proposed in this paper can be applied to studying other famous writer's creativity and his works' literary reputation.