The Use of Pues in Moreto: A Stylostatistical Study

THE USE OF PUES IN MORETO: A STYLOSTATISTICAL STUDY John B. Wooldridge Northern Virginia Community College Stylostatistics, or statistical stylistics, is the utilization of statistics to determine an individual author's style. This method is based upon the hypothesis that every writer has a particular vocabulary and syntax, certain writing patterns peculiar to himself which he subconsciously follows. «This implies,» declares Gustav Herdan, «that linguistic expression is less a matter of deliberate choice of words than it would appear at first sight. »(1) This theory that an author's work bears the imprint of his personality and that his imprint can be catalogued and compared to that of other writers dates from the middle of the last century.(2) Investigators in the field have examined the characteristic terms, the prose rhythm, the word, line, and sentence length, the monosyllabism, the imagery, the ratio of various parts of speech, the syntax, the alliteration, the assonance, and the word frequency of a host of writers, from ancient ones like Sophocles and Euripides to modern ones like Hemingway and Proust.(3) Considering the massive corpus of seventeenth-century Spanish drama and the unanswered questions regarding authorship, it is not surprising that so many comedia scholars have also been preoccupied with the search for clues to detecting the style of individual writers. Such aspects of style as versification, dramatic technique, internal structure of the verse, rhyming techniques, social and moral ideology, etc. have been investigated. However , few have utilized statistics in their work. One of the few was S. Griswold Morley, who in a study published over seventy-five years ago called style «an absolute criterion of authorship. »(4) His contributions to our knowledge of the versification patterns of Golden Age playwrights have been invaluable, as have those ofhis predecessor M. A. Buchanan, his collaborator Courtney Bruerton, and several others. Interestingly enough, however, very little has been done in two areas mentioned by Morley in an article written some forty years ago: lexicon and syntax. At that time he stated that «the comparative vocabulary and syntax of the dramatists of the siglo de oro offers a practically untouched field of investigation.»(5) This is still true, in spite of a few works that treat these features of style in the comedia .(6) Not one, however, involves word-frequency, a part of stylostatistics that has been utilized by specialists in many literatures.(7) Among Hispanists this investigative tool has remained unused for comparative 53 54 Bulletin ofthe Comediantes study. My own interest in word-frequency as a determinant of style began about two years ago, not as an effort to fill a void but simply out of curiosity, since at that time I knew virtually nothing about linguistic statistics. While rapidly skimming one of Calderón's plays, I was suddenly struck by how often the word pues was appearing. I decided to see if my impression was correct. First I counted the number of times the word is used in£a vida es sueño and then in several plays by the major dramatists of the period.(8) The results are in the following table: TABLE 1(9) Lope de Vega (1562-1635) Title of play No. of No.Freq.Aver, verses timesof usethese puesofplays usedpues 1)El remedio en la desdicha 2)Elprincipe despeñado 3)La batalla del honor 4)La buena guarda 5)El bastardo Mudarra 6)Fuente Ovejuna 7)Elgalán de la Membrilla 8)La niñez delPadre Rojas 9)Elpiadoso aragonés 10)El castigo sin venganza 11)ElAmor enamorado 3017 3024 3124 2896 3028 2455 3213 2480 2996 3021 2785 88 75 107 76 94 66 98 72 84 79 68 34.3 40.3 29.2 38.1 32.2 37.2 32.8 34.4 35.7 38.2 41.0 35.3 Guillen de Castro (1569-1631) 1)Los mal casados de Valencia 2)Don Quijote de la Mancha 3)ElNarciso en su opinión 4)Las mocedades del Cid, I 5)Las mocedades del Cid, ? 6)La tragedia por los celos T)Ingratitudpor amor 3012 3102 3029 3004 2863 2737 2564 112 92 100 84 91 109 98 26.9 29.6 33...