Policzmy Trylogię Sienkiewicza

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to show how various countable features of a literary text – exemplified here by the trilogy of historical romances by Henryk Sienkiewicz – can be helpful in contrastive analyses between writings by two or more authors, writings by the same author, or even different fragments of the same text (volumes, chapters, characters’ individual languages). The simplest measures (leading to the simplest conclusions) include text size expressed in various units (number of words, sentences, paragraphs) and proportions in various modes of writing (e.g. dialogue vs. narration); somewhat more complex is the calculation and the evaluation of vocabulary richness (or lexical density) – the paper proposes Standardized Type/Token Ratio as the method exhibiting the least dependence on text size. At this point, the importance of calculating statistical significance is claimed. Distribution graphs are useful in presenting the trends in chapter length, which behave differently for different parts of the Trilogy. Sentence length is confronted with content; the longest sentences in Sienkiewicz’s masterpiece have been found to be connected with the political/military context. The sizes of individual characters’ parts in the dialogue might be found in interesting connection with the significance of each character in the story; in Sienkiewicz, feminine parts are markedly shorter than masculine. The same is true of vocabulary richness of these parts. The study of keywords (words statistically significantly more or less frequent in one text as compared with another text) also yields interesting information on Sienkiewicz’s writing technique. Most importantly, a repeated phenomenon has been observed: in all parts of the Trilogy, the initially infrequent lecz tends to gradually increase its occurrence at the expense of the generally more frequent ale.