Syntactic patterns help identify different writing styles in stories
Syntactic Patterns and Stylistic Functions in Narrative Prose: A Rule-Based and Machine-Learning Approach
Computation and Language
Summary
This paper explores how the grammar and structure of sentences relate to different writing styles in stories. The authors created a method that uses a set of clear rules to label sentences into five categories like descriptive or causal based on their words and sentence structure. They then used these labels and patterns to train a computer program to automatically recognize these styles with high accuracy. Their work provides a simple and repeatable way to study how sentence structure affects the meaning and feel of narrative writing. The goal is not to make a complete style theory but to offer tools to analyze storytelling grammar.
syntactic structurestylistic functionnarrative prosedependency parsingpart-of-speech taggingrule-based classificationmachine learninglinearised triplesmacro-F1 score
Authors
Stefana Janicijevic
Abstract
This paper presents a small-scale quantitative experiment that links syntactic structure to stylistic functions in narrative prose. Starting from a dependency-parsed corpus of 3,300 sentences, we derive sentence-level stylistic labels across five categories --- descriptive, introspective, causal, ideological, and neutral --- using a transparent rule-based procedure that inspects lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and syntactic relations. For each sentence we construct a compact representation of its syntactic profile as a sequence of linearised triples combining lemma, POS tag, and dependency relation. These patterns serve as input to standard machine-learning classifiers trained to predict sentence-level style. The best-performing model achieves a macro-F1 of 0.948 under 10-fold cross-validation. The experiment is implemented entirely in Python using open-source tools. Our goal is not to propose a fully fledged stylistic theory, but to offer a reproducible and extensible workflow for exploring how grammatical structure contributes to narrative interpretation.