Smells like Teen Spirit: An Exploration of Sensorial Style in Literary Genres

TL;DR

This study investigates whether sensorial language is a stylistic feature in literature, finding that it is a stable, genre-specific, and non-random aspect that can be identified with a small set of sentences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel focus on sensorial language as a stylistic marker and demonstrates its stability, genre-specificity, and extractability from limited text samples.

Findings

Sensorial language use is non-random and likely a stylistic choice.

Sensorial style remains stable over time with minimal shifts.

Distinctive sensorial features are identified for each literary genre.

Abstract

It is well recognized that sensory perceptions and language have interconnections through numerous studies in psychology, neuroscience, and sensorial linguistics. Set in this rich context we ask whether the use of sensorial language in writings is part of linguistic style? This question is important from the view of stylometrics research where a rich set of language features have been explored, but with insufficient attention given to features related to sensorial language. Taking this as the goal we explore several angles about sensorial language and style in collections of lyrics, novels, and poetry. We find, for example, that individual use of sensorial language is not a random phenomenon; choice is likely involved. Also, sensorial style is generally stable over time - the shifts are extremely small. Moreover, style can be extracted from just a few hundred sentences that have sensorial terms. We also identify representative and distinctive features within each genre. For example, we observe that 4 of the top 6 representative features in novels collection involved individuals using olfactory language where we expected them to use non-olfactory language.