Fractality and Variability in Canonical and Non-Canonical English Fiction and in Non-Fictional Texts

This study investigates global properties of literary and non-literary texts. Within the texts, a distinction is made between canonical non-canonical works. The central hypothesis that three text types (non-literary, literary/canonical literary/non-canonical) exhibit systematic differences with respect to structural design features as correlates aesthetic responses in readers. To investigate these differences, we compiled corpus containing texts categories interest, Jena Textual Aesthetics Corpus. Two aspects structure are investigated, variability self-similar (fractal) patterns, which reflect long-range correlations along We use four basic observations, (i) frequency POS-tags per sentence, (ii) sentence length, (iii) lexical diversity chunks text, (iv) distribution topic probabilities These observations grouped into two more general categories, (a) low-level (ii), observed at level (reflecting linguistic decoding), (b) high-level (iv), textual comprehension). transformed time series, series subject multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA). Our results show better discriminators than properties, for under analysis. Canonical differ from ones primarily terms variability. Fractality seems be universal feature pronounced Beyond specific study, intend open up new perspectives on experimental aesthetics.