A Sentence-Based Stylistic History of the Hungarian Novel

The paper presents a method for the automatic identification of different types of compound and complex sentences in Hungarian through the analysis of conjunctions and their positions. This method opens up new perspectives in stylometry: on the one hand, conjunctions as function words provide a large amount of data for statistical analyses, and on the other hand, they also carry meaning - about the relations between clauses (e.g. opposition, conditionality). By examining the relative frequency of each type, it is possible to reveal the most typical relations between clauses in a given text or corpus. In this way, the style of novels can be described at the level of the sentence, while also revealing the topological-logical structure and epistemological attitude of the texts, which is not usually reflected in the reading process. This method also provides an opportunity to identify different stylistic traditions in literary history.