"Linguistic Fingerprinting and Literary Fraud"

Abstract

Many experts of literary style postulate that style is dictated by the subconscious and forms the "genetic" fingerprint of a writer's work. This implies that (a) it is impossible to disguise one's style and (b) that works written under a pseudonym should contain the genetic fingerprint of the writer. In this paper, I shall test this hypothesis in light of the pseudonymous works of the French author Romain Gary/Emile Ajar. I chose Gary because he provides and excellent example of authorship attribution study, which is the analysis of stylistic traits of an author as an index of authenticity. This analysis will deal mainly with vocabulary distribution as an element of style; it will look at high frequency words and the use of synonyms as style discriminants to make conclusions about style.