An Empirical Investigation of Authorial Writing Styles Based on a Vietnamese Corpus

Abstract

A growing body of evidence suggests groups of people have their unique writing style, e.g., language use of females-males, the elderly-the youth, and so on. However, previous studies of Vietnamese texts have not dealt with language use associated with authors’ occupation. This study aims to portray the different ways in which technical and non-technical groups of authors use personal pronouns and negative words based on VVC_JSEAL, a ten-thousand-word Vietnamese news corpus. A combined qualitative and quantitative methodological approach was used to investigate authorial writing styles, including correspondence analysis along with sociolinguistic interpretation. Analysis of word use for occupational groups of authors revealed the most significant associations on writing style which were identified for either first or third personal pronouns. However, negative words demonstrate their insignificant associations, while a combination of these words and personal pronouns has more significant relationships with authorial writing style. This study implies that occupational group of authors has a unique linguistic style, and word-level features of that style will recur with a relative stable frequency.