The mathematical distinction between prose and verse may be detected in writings that are not apparently lineated, for example in T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, and Jim Crace’s Quarantine. In this paper we offer comments on appropriate statistical methods for such work, and also on the nature of formal innovation in these two texts. Additional remarks are made on the roots of lineation as a metric...

The results of a computational analysis of all predications, finite and non-finite, in a one-million-word corpus of present-day American English (the "Brown Corpus") are presented. The analysis shows the nature of the syntactic differences among the various genres of writing represented in the data base, especially between informative prose and imaginative prose. The results also demonstrate th...

Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose, even though with prose, the subjects don’t know the length of the omitted word. We hypothesize that this effect reflects a tendency of natural language to hav...

We are witnessing the emergence of a new technology for dynamically creating stories tailored to the interests of particular readers. Narrative prose generators o er much promise for literacy education, but designing them for maximal e ectiveness requires us to understand their e ect on readers. This article describes the evaluation of StoryBook, an implemented narrative prose generation system...