As the recent studies indicate, the structure imposed onto written texts by the presence of punctuation develops patterns which reveal certain characteristics of universality. In particular, based on a large collection of classic literary works, it has been evidenced that the distances between consecutive punctuation marks, measured in terms of the number of words, obey the discrete Weibull distribution—a discrete variant of a distribution often used in survival analysis. The present work extends the analysis of punctuation usage patterns to more experimental pieces of world literature. It turns out that the compliance of the the distances between punctuation marks with the discrete Weibull distribution typically applies here as well. However, some of the works by James Joyce are distinct in this regard—in the sense that the tails of the relevant distributions are significantly thicker and, consequently, the corresponding hazard functions are decreasing functions not observed in typical literary texts in prose. Finnegans Wake—the same one to which science owes the word quarks for the most fundamental constituents of matter—is particularly striking in this context. At the same time, in all the studied texts, the sentence lengths—representing the distances between sentence-ending punctuation marks—reveal more freedom and are not constrained by the discrete Weibull distribution. This freedom in some cases translates into long-range nonlinear correlations, which manifest themselves in multifractality. Again, a text particularly spectacular in terms of multifractality is Finnegans Wake.
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August 2024
Research Article|
August 20 2024
Statistics of punctuation in experimental literature—The remarkable case of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Tomasz Stanisz
;
Tomasz Stanisz
(Conceptualization, Investigation, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
1
Complex Systems Theory Department, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences
, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland
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Stanisław Drożdż
;
Stanisław Drożdż
a)
(Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing)
1
Complex Systems Theory Department, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences
, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland
2
Faculty of Computer Science and Telecommunications, Cracow University of Technology
, ul. Warszawska 24, 31-155 Kraków, Poland
a)Author to whom correspondence should be addressed: stanislaw.drozdz@ifj.edu.pl
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Jarosław Kwapień
Jarosław Kwapień
(Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing)
1
Complex Systems Theory Department, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences
, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland
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a)Author to whom correspondence should be addressed: stanislaw.drozdz@ifj.edu.pl
Chaos 34, 083124 (2024)
Article history
Received:
February 14 2024
Accepted:
July 05 2024
Citation
Tomasz Stanisz, Stanisław Drożdż, Jarosław Kwapień; Statistics of punctuation in experimental literature—The remarkable case of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Chaos 1 August 2024; 34 (8): 083124. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0203530
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