Computation Into Criticism

Book excerpt: In this book, John Burrows reveals that prepositions, conjunctions, personal pronouns, and articles--the part of speech that make up at least one third of fictional works in English--can tell us a great deal about the characters who speak them. By computing the frequency which with characters use words such as "the," "of," "it," and "I", it becomes possible to study character development in an even clearer light than before. What emerges from this unique study is the groundwork for more authoritative literary judgements.