Mondathosszúság és irodalomtörténet

100 magyar regény szövegstatisztikai elemzése

Absztrakt

Sentence Length and Literary History

This paper intends to draw conclusions about literary history and stylistics, using data processing methods in the R Studio software environment. The quantitative analysis of one hundred Hungarian novels between 1832 and 2005 is based on the average sentence length in each text. By assigning the values of the average sentence lengths to the years of publication, we can create graphs that show unequivocal trends and thus allow for a new approach to the history of the Hungarian novel. In the process of interpretating the trends of Hungarian literary tradition, the history of public education and growing literacy, as well as the history of 19th century press also appear as important aspects. At the same time, it is necessary to see the differences behind the homogenizing image of the graphs: the paper therefore attempts to study texts belonging to the same trend but composed in fundamentally different ways – concentrating especially on the long-sentence prose of the 1970s and 80s.