菲茨杰拉德创作能力的变迁——基于词汇测度的统计分析

传统上,不同评论者对同一作家作品的好恶往往会导致对作家创作能力截然不同的评价,这种主观定性评判并没有考虑作品本身的内在特质。计算语言学发现幂律分布在各类文本的词汇测度中具有普遍性,这为定量刻画文学作品的内在特质提供了统计手段。因为作家的创作能力不是一成不变的,不同创作时期的作品反映了作家创作能力的波动,为检验这一论断,以菲茨杰拉德的四部小说为例,对包括类符形符比、词汇增长率和词汇相对熵等在内的词汇测度进行统计分析,发现这三个测度与文中的形符数之间服从幂律关系。故提出一种计算作家创作能力的新测度以及比较其创作能力变化的新方法。菲茨杰拉德作品的实证分析表明：该测度不仅能够有力地印证现有的定性评论观点,而且还能够有效地反映作家创作能力的巅峰与低谷状态。

The Vicissitude of Fitzgerald's Creative Ability: a Statistical Analysis Based on Lexical Measures

Traditionally,the critical evaluation of a writer＇s creativity depends heavily on the critic＇s taste.However,this qualitative criticism is subjective,for it does not take the text＇s intrinsic characteristics into account.The power law distribution in the lexical measures of different texts has been discovered widely by the study on computational linguistics,which provides a statistical method for quantifying the intrinsic characteristics of literary texts.In this condition,Scott Fitzgerald＇s four novels are taken as examples to analyze statistically their lexical measures,such as the type token ratio,vocabulary growth rate and relative entropy.And a new measure is put forward to calculate the writer＇s creativity,with which a new means to make a minute comparison of his creativity＇s variation is also proposed.The experimental analysis of Fitzgerald＇s novels demonstrates that this measure can not only corroborate the existing critical opinions,but also portray the vicissitude of a writer＇s creative ability effectively.