Characterizing authorship: Stylometric and pragmatic analysis of editorials in political newsmagazines

Stylometry is the quantitative study of authorial style. Although the stylometric literature has considered lexical and syntactic variables in works of fiction and nonfiction, little attention has been given to pragmatic or contextual features, such as the use of quotation and deixis. The editorials of 2 political newsmagazines, 100 each from National Review (NR) and The Nation (TN), provide the dataset for analysis of quotation and deixis among a total of 37 features or potential discriminators of authorship. The importance of the features was ranked using 2 statistical techniques: decision trees and binary logistic regression.; Editorials by the conservative NR seem to be more protracted and self-referential, whereas those by the liberal TN seem more compact and perhaps figurative or abstract. As phenomena that grammaticalize context and manifest voice, quotation and content-specific deixis are ranked quite favorably by the statistical techniques employed, showing the value of pragmatics in characterizing authorship.