Measuring the Style of Italian Literary Criticism: A Comparison between Professional and Non-professional Book Reviews
Measuring the Style of Italian Literary Criticism: A Comparison between Professional and Non-professional Book Reviews
Author(s): Simone ReboraSubject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Applied Linguistics
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: book reviews; literary criticism; digital social reading; Italian language; stylometry
Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the results of a series of computational analyses applied to professional and nonprofessional book reviews in the Italian language. A corpus of texts from the aNobii platform and from La Domenica del Sole 24 Ore is processed with a stylometric approach (Cosine Delta distance), confirming how 50 most frequent words are more effective in distinguishing the two sources than the usage of a specialized lexicon of literary criticism. Deeper linguistic investigations verify which words are the most important in determining the distinction and how their usage differ in the two content platforms. A closer analysis through word co-occurrence and keyword in context closes the paper, highlighting the more evaluative and subjective language used in non-professional book reviews.
Journal: Romanica Cracoviensia
- Issue Year: 25/2025
- Issue No: 3
- Page Range: 243-255
- Page Count: 13
- Language: English
