The Statistical Analysis of Style: Reflections On Form, Meaning, and Ideology in The Nausicaa' Episode of

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The Statistical Analysis of Style:

Reflections on Form, Meaning, and
Ideology in the ‘Nausicaa’ Episode
of Ulysses
C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia
Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing,
Faculty of Arts and Social Science, The University of Newcastle,
New South Wales 2308, Australia
Abstract
The study first establishes a set of formal properties of Ulysses through a computa-
tional approach based on frequency counts of the ninety-nine most common
words of the text. The common words are first used to discriminate interior
monologue, dialogue, and narrative, and then to discriminate between the dif-
ferent narrative styles of the text. The discriminations are achieved by means of
multivariate statistics, such as principal component analysis, and by distribution
tests (Student’s t-test and Mann–Whitney test). Using the linguistic premise that
all matter is meaning, as well as Bakhtin’s argument that all language is ideo-
logically saturated, the study then explores the relationship between common
words, meaning, and ideology. It concentrates on the Gerty MacDowell section
of episode 13 of Ulysses in order to show how common words that appear more
frequently in that episode than in others—such as two modals, two causal con-
junctions, and one preposition—are integral to the various syntactic structures
that differentiate styles and contribute to the meaning and ideology of the text.
The article links these discriminations to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony and to
his discussion of the ‘creation of specific novelistic images of languages’. Its
conclusion, therefore, is that computational analysis of style can open inter-
pretation to details of form, meaning, and ideology that enable humanities
computing to make a distinctive contribution to literary criticism.
Correspondence:
Professor C. W. F. McKenna,
Dean’s Unit, College of Arts,
1 Introduction
Education, and Social Science, The use of frequency counts of common words to distinguish styles has
University of Western Sydney, become a well-established technique, and the method developed by
Locked Bag 1797, Burrows in the Newcastle Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing
Penrith South DC,
NSW 1797, Australia.
was recently described by Holmes as ‘the standard first port-of-call for
E-mail: attributional problems in stylometry’ (Holmes, 1998, p. 114). The
w.mckenna@uws.edu.au method involves multivariate statistical techniques such as principal
© Oxford University Press 2001 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001 353
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component analysis as well as distribution tests such as Student’s t-test

and the Mann–Whitney test. Were all of the common words used
randomly across the text, and were all of them occurring with non-
significant variation in frequency, they would offer little basis for
discriminating between styles, but what emerges strongly from our work
on Joyce—and it is consistent with previous and continuing work by, for
example, Burrows (1987, 1992, 1994, 1999), Craig (1992, 1999, 2000),
Tabata (1991), and Binongo and Smith (1997)—is just how powerful the
most common words of our language are in discriminating between
styles. Statistical analyses of word frequencies reveal strong formal dis-
tinctions between styles and so the question must be asked: what is the
relationship between these formal properties of the text as described and
an interpretation of the meaning of the text? In itself a word such as could
or because may not convey a great deal of meaning, but texts in which
such words appear very frequently will have syntactic and grammatical
structures that are very different from those in texts in which such words
appear very infrequently. This article will demonstrate how a set of formal
distinctions, based on the text as a set of word tokens, can be articulated
for Ulysses and it will then discuss narration in ‘Nausicaa’, episode 13 of
Ulysses, by focusing on two modals: could and would; two causal conjunc-
tives: so and because; and prepositional phrases beginning with like, so as
to provide examples of the distinctive ideology of the narrative as it shapes
our awareness of Gerty MacDowell. When the narrative uses the phrases
or clauses built around those causal conjunctives and that preposition in
an attempt to explain, compare, and expand upon Gerty’s behaviour and
thoughts, it reveals her lack of understanding of her social world, and the
modals that so frequently accompany the discourse about her show her
complete lack of the power needed to achieve her aspirations.
The structures built around the common words communicate much
about the socio-cultural, economic, and political worlds of the literary
texts that they constitute. This recognition provides the path from the
description of formal properties of a text to the cultural implications of
what it has revealed; it facilitates investigation of the relationship between
form and meaning and enables us to contemplate in particular what
Hasan has described as ‘distinctive ways of saying’. In ‘Ways of saying,
ways of meaning’ Hasan contrasts two views of the relationship between
‘the how and the what, the manner and the matter, the style and the
content’ (Hasan, 1996, p. 191). The first view argues that different
phrases may nonetheless be ‘two ways of saying the same thing . . . such a
view implies that meanings are immanent, with an existence independent
of the expressive symbolic system, and that some kinds of meaning are
matter whereas others are not’; the second view, however, argues that ‘all
kinds of meaning are matter, and that, far from being immanent,
meanings are the function of the relations that hold between the symbols
of an expressive system’(p. 191). In this second view
the dichotomy between form and meaning is rejected . . . different

ways of saying are different ways of meaning—obviously not the
354 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001

Statistical Analysis of Style in Ulysses
same thing. How we say is indicative of how we mean. And a

culture develops characteristic ways of meaning. These ways of
meaning, in their totality, are specific to that culture; they consti-
tute its semiotic style.
Hasan takes a broad view of semiotic style, so that it ‘covers not only
characteristic ways of saying but also of being and behaving’ (p. 191).
This perspective brings Hasan close to Bakhtin’s emphasis on discourse
as social, though in the more defined context of a literary work, such as a
novel, we respond to ‘being’ and ‘behaving’ only through written words
and not through actual social behaviour. At the beginning of ‘Discourse
in the Novel’ Bakhtin writes:
The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can
and must overcome the divorce between an abstract ‘formal’
approach and an equally abstract ‘ideological’ approach. Form and
content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal
discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire
range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to
the furthest reaches of abstract meaning (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 259).
Bakhtin does not explicitly mention common words in ‘Discourse in the
Novel’ but the breadth of his statement implies that they be included in
this conception of verbal discourse, and we shall explore two powerful
reasons why this should be so. First, the common words of the language
control the syntactic and grammatical structures upon which so much
meaning depends. They impact upon the relationship between form and
content, and without them the structures that govern meaning would be
at best elliptical. Secondly, the common words have proven to be a
significant part of the matter of our sentences, and that significance is
twofold: the numerical weight of the words themselves, but more import-
antly their capacity to generate statistically significant discriminations
between a range of styles. It is in those discriminations that we have
examples of ‘distinctive ways of saying’ in which we can trace, at least in
part, some of the ideological forces in a text and thus link what Bakhtin
refers to as the formal and ideological.
2 Method and Results

The text of Ulysses was prepared for our computer programs in
accordance with protocols that include expansion of contractions,
contraction of proper names to one word token, and discrimination of
homographs such as that into relative, demonstrative, and conjunctive
groups, or so into conjunctive and adverbial groups (McKenna and
Antonia, 1994). Text was also marked up as dialogue, interior mono-
logue, and narrative, in order to compare the stylistic distinctiveness of
Joyce’s use of these modes of writing. Quite clearly, it is not always a
straightforward task in Ulysses to mark the shift between interior mono-
logue and narrative, which can sometimes be impossible to establish with
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001 355

certainty and which therefore requires an exercise of judgement; equally

clearly, however, the number of areas of potential disagreement is not
sufficiently great to have any significant impact on the strength of the
statistical discriminations that produce the plots shown in Figs 1 and 2. A
good deal more judgement would be required, and thus a much greater
degree of uncertainty, if we were to attempt to distinguish shifts between
a narrative that we might attribute to an anonymous narrator and a
narrative that we might attribute to the point of view of a particular
character. We have not attempted to distinguish narrative in that way.
After the mark-up, the text was divided into sections of similar size but
with respect, where possible, for the breaks between episodes. Two
episodes were treated a little differently from the others in terms of the
division into sections. Since episode 12, unlike other episodes, includes
first-person narrative as well as third-person narrative, these were
marked separately, so as to show the different relation of each to the text’s
basic third-person narrative. For episode 17 the questions and the
answers were marked separately so as to test what difference would
emerge. The plot entry for the questions locates to the west of the cluster
of entries representing the answers. For episodes 1–9 the sections are
whole single episodes or pairs of episodes, as detailed in Table 1. For the
later episodes 10–17, sections are generally of 2,000 words, with any
additional words at the end of an episode being added to the last section
of that episode. In episode 14, the sections vary from the 2,000 words so
that the end of each section can coincide with the end of a particular
imitation. The fragments from 14 : 1,440 to the end of that episode were
omitted because they depart so radically from regular syntax, and for the
same reason the opening sixty-three lines of episode 11 were also
omitted. Thus, we arrived at fifty-five sections of narration, thirty-two
sections of interior monologue (for Bloom, Molly, and Stephen), and
eight sections of dialogue (for Bloom and Stephen), as detailed in Table 1.
The dialogue of other characters was not included in this study. A
frequency count of all words occurring in Ulysses established the ninety-
nine most common words of the text (see Table 2), and further frequency
counts established the count for each word in each section. These counts
were standardized to allow for variations in the total size of individual
sections, with each count being expressed as a percentage of all the words
in that section. Each count was then correlated with every other count so
as to produce a matrix (using the Pearson product-moment method of
correlation). Using principal component analysis, we have then pro-
duced the plots in Fig. 1A and B. Plot 1B shows which words (the 1 See Burrows 1992a and b;
variables) account for the most significant variations in the data. Vectors Craig 1992, p. 200; Burrows
and Craig 1994, note 5. The
A and B represent the first two principal components. (These techniques
plots are produced using
are fully described elsewhere.1) Because of the statistical procedures DeltaGraph, from DeltaPoint
involved in producing these two plots, they correspond with one another, Inc., Monterey. For
which means, for example, that those words in the western area of plot 1B descriptions of principal
are the words most frequently used in those sections that lie in the component analysis, see
western area of plot 1A. Chatfield and Collins (1980),
Plot 1A, based on the ninety-nine most common words of Ulysses, Chapter 4.

shows the relationships between narrative, dialogue, and interior

monologue for the sections detailed in Table 1. The sections of interior
monologue clustered to the west are those of Molly; those alongside them
to the east are those of Bloom; those to the north, which range into the
sections of narrative, are those of Stephen. A detailed commentary on
these sections of internal monologue appears in our previous work
(McKenna and Antonia, 1996). The dialogue of Bloom and Stephen is to
the north of the interior monologue, and it is again Stephen who breaks
the pattern a little when his dialogue ranges into the narrative sections
plotted. The narrative sections separate into a cluster of six sections in the
eastern part of the plot, which represents the first nine episodes of the
text, whilst the remaining forty-nine sections, representing episodes
10–17, range across the north-eastern and western parts of the plot. (A
more detailed comparison of the narrative sections will be looked at in
Table 1 Sections of interior monologue, narrative and dialogue (within episodes

the sections occur intermittently within the range indicated by the line numbers)
Character Episode Line numbers Number of words
Interior monologue:
thirty-two sections
Stephen 1 and 2 All 2,046
3 0001–0255 2,087
3 0263–0502 2,086
7 and 9 All 2,083
Bloom 4 All 2,908
5 0003–0333 1,852
5 0333–0566 1,853
6 0012–0449 1,880
6 0450–0796 1,880
6 0796–1,033 1,881
7 All 1,328
8 0001–0279 2,150
8 0311–0535 2,150
8 0535–0855 2,150
8 0856–1,193 2,151
11 0149–0906 2,041
11 0907–1,291 2,041
13 0771–0927 2,058
13 0928–1,096 2,058
13 1,097–1,285 2,058
Molly 18 0001–0127 2,000
18 0128–0257 2,000
18 0258–0386 2,000
18 0386–0515 2,000
18 0516–0648 2,000
18 0648–0785 2,000
18 0786–0920 2,000
18 0920–1,050 2,000
18 1,050–1,180 2,000
18 1,180–1,315 2,000
18 1,315–1,444 2,000
18 1,444–1,609 2,611

Fig. 1 (A) Ulysses: narrative,

dialogue, interior monologue
(text-plot based on the
ninety-nine most common
words of the text).
(B) Ulysses: narrative, dialogue,
interior monologue (word-plot
for the ninety-nine most
common words of the text).
plots 2A and B.) Accompanying plot 1A is the word plot, labelled 1B, but
because of the density of the plot in the western area we are unable to fit
all words and markers into the plot—there are eight ‘missing’.2
Looking at plot 1B, Molly clearly dominates the use of the common 2 The eight ‘missing’ words
words. They concentrate in the section of the word plot that corresponds and their coordinates (vector
A first) are: will –336.364,
to the location of her sections of internal monologue. Of the forty-four
–25.826; about –292.362,
most highly discriminating words of internal monologue that can be
–30.385; now –310.068,
identified when Molly’s interior monologue is compared with Stephen’s, 15.077; see –356.168, –43.342;
thirty-seven are words most often used by Molly and only seven are time –284.872, 20.194; am
words most often used by Stephen; similarly, in the comparison between –347.499, –42.486; know
Molly and Bloom, twenty-nine of the top thirty-three discriminating –400.804, –45.105; can
common words are most frequently used by Molly and only four are –373.193, –20.616.

most frequently used by Stephen. These Molly words include very strong
use of pronouns, especially the personal pronouns, and such emphasizers
as demonstrative that which are a feature of the vigorous, colloquial, and
outspoken idiom of Molly, who is not averse to scornful commentary
and to making claims upon the high moral ground. The cluster of
adverbial particle up, and of out and off, similarly points to her informal
syntax. The modal forms would and could mark her emphasis on
possibility and probability, her projections and occasional desire for
different outcomes, much as the modals mark the narrative that deals
with Gerty MacDowell in episode 13.
In order to see more clearly the discriminations between the large
number of narrative sections, we have carried out a set of separate
analyses with these sections using the same statistical procedures but with
a word-list of the ninety-nine most common words drawn this time from
narrative alone and not from dialogue or interior monologue (see Table
3). The result of a principal component analysis of the fifty-five sections,
using these ninety-nine words, is shown in Fig. 2A. From that plot the
sections can be separated into two groups: one group of eighteen
sections, which includes episodes 1–11 and 15; the other group of thirty-
seven sections, which includes episodes 12–14 and 16–17. Taking these
two groups, we have used distribution tests (Student’s t-test and the
Mann–Whitney test) in order to compare them. These distribution tests
assess whether the variations in the data occur at statistically significant
levels. The results appear in Table 4, which provides information on the
sixty-five words whose frequencies discriminate significantly, on all of
the tests that we have carried out, between the two groups of eighteen and
thirty-seven narrative sections. The first three columns of Table 4 show a
ranked order of significance on the t-test, a frequency rank, and the
relevant word. Columns 4 and 5 show the scores and degrees of freedom
for each word on the t-test where the scores satisfy the established
requirements of the test for statistical significance. Columns 6 and 7 show
the levels of probability on the t-test and on the Mann–Whitney test. A
probability of P < 0.05 (less than one chance in twenty) is generally
deemed ‘significant’ and a probability of P < 0.001 (less than one chance
in 1,000) ‘very highly significant’. When a large number of such tests are
carried out it remains necessary, however, to recognize that some of the
significant results might have occurred by chance, and there are methods,
such as the Bonferroni method, that can take account of this. In our
results, however, where so many words return ‘significant’ or better
results (sixty-five of the ninety-nine words), we are clearly dealing with
an effect well beyond what would be expected by chance: forty-eight
words discriminate at probabilities of P < 0.001 and thus fall within the
‘very highly significant’ range; thirty-six words attain even higher levels
of significance with a probability of P < 0.0001, or less than one chance in
10,000 (on both Student’s t-test and the Mann–Whitney test). The clear
result in Fig. 2A demonstrates the remarkable development of the text
from a cluster of sections representing episodes 1–9, which remain close
together, towards a pattern in which individual episodes for the most

Table 2 Ulysses: the ninety-nine most common words

The, of, and, a, in (p), he, his, I, to (i), it,
With, is, to (p), was, you, that (d), for (p), her, not, on (p),
Him, all, at, she, said, by (p), as, they, from, what,
Or, me, out, be, had, my, there, up (ap), have, their,
Are, one, but, them, would, will (v), do, an, like (p), then,
When, if, about, did, were, that (rp), which (rp), we ,your, old,
Says, that (c), down, over, this, too, now, see, after, no (a),
Man, could, two, time, off, on (ap), am, back, yes, who (rp),
O, where, into, eyes, know, good, those, some, more, other,
Has, hand, can, here, how, little, our, way, so (ad)
(a) = adjective; (ad) = adverb; (ap) = adverbial particle; (c) = conjunction;

(d) = demonstrative; (i) = infinitive; (p) = preposition; (rp) = relative pronoun;
(v) = verb.
part form a series of distinct sub-groups—save for the separation

between the first-person and third-person narrative of episode 12, and
the western location of the first two sections of episode 14 which
comprise the prose imitations of the earliest periods up to and including
Bunyan. The episodes early in the text are marked by frequent use of
those words in the south-eastern and eastern part of Fig. 2B, and by
relatively infrequent use of the words in the western part of the plot. The
words in the east and south-east form, for the most part, a very tight
cluster. These words include the lexical verbs and nouns that provide the
formal structure for the dialogue and that record the movements of
characters, their arrivals, departures, responses to interlocutors, and their
common actions; not surprisingly, the related prepositions of direction
also locate themselves here. The narrative of the first eleven episodes
constitutes what Lawrence described as ‘a relatively consistent style of
narration’ (Lawrence, 1981, p. 41) and as one that ‘establishes the
empirical world of the novel; it provides stability and continuity. . . . It is a
style that orients the reader and offers him a certain security by
establishing the sense of the solidity of external reality’ (Lawrence, 1981,
p. 43).
As the text develops, the styles of course become much more varied,
and thus in Fig. 2A the sections stretch across a much wider area. The
verb forms in the western part of the plot are the modals would and could,
which occur most commonly in the narrative that describes Gerty, and
various forms of the verbs to be or to have either as past or auxiliary
forms. The strength of be as a marker of episodes 13 and 16 is influenced,
particularly in the case of episode 13, by the prevalence of these modals,
for there are many phrases such as would be and could be in the account of
Gerty’s projections. The relative poverty of expression that is signalled by
the prevalence of was in episodes 13 and 16 is just one indication of the
marked shifts in tone that occur in the later narrative. The later episodes
of the book also include much higher concentrations of conjunctions and
prepositions than are found earlier in the text. A conjunctive word such
as though, scarcely to be seen at all through the narrative of the first nine
episodes, becomes prominent in episode 16. The highest scores for use of

Table 3 Ulysses: the ninety-nine most common words of narrative

The, of, and, a, he, in (p), his, with, to (p), to (i),
Was, said, her, on (p), by (p), it, from, at, as, for (p),
She, him, had, all, not, or, says, their, an, they,
Which (rp), out, that (d), up (ap), but, be, that (c), one, were, what,
There, is, then, them, would, that (rp), over, about, hand, eyes,
Down, back, its, who (rp), did, two, when, into, through, after,
On (ap), asked, other, head, face, more, again, under, off, could,
Came, man, himself, being, old, have, if, you, no (a), like (p),
Went, some, been, round, this, hat, towards, turned, little, where,
Time, though, hands, door, I, so (c), because, voice, now
Fig. 2 (A) Ulysses: narrative

episodes (text-plot based on the
A
ninety-nine most common
words of the narrative).
(B) Ulysses: narrative episodes
(word-plot for the ninety-nine
most common words of the
narrative).

though occur in the sections into which episode 16 has been divided. The
asides and interruptions in that narrative, of the kind: ‘though that is
rather a far cry’ (849); ‘though it merely went to show’ (640); and
‘Rumour had it (though not proved)’ (136), provide one distinctive
feature of the style of this episode.3 However, the seven sections of
episode 15, which align with the earlier episodes on the eastern side of the
plot, reinforce the view expressed by Houston on the ‘analogies of style
between the stage directions, if that is the proper term, in the Nighttown
chapter and the narrative sentences of earlier chapters’ (Houston, 1989,
p. 34).
The presence of the five sections of episode 13 in the south-western
part of plot 2A shows how, using our methodology, these five sections
form a cluster that distinguishes them from the sections in the other
episodes; the word plot, Fig. 2B, shows which are the high-frequency
words that most strongly discriminate these sections. Amongst these
words are would and could, so (as conjunction) and because, and like
(preposition). As Table 4 indicates, would is an extremely powerful
discriminator between the eighteen sections and the thirty-seven
sections; indeed, would appears in only one of the eighteen. In the thirty-
seven sections, it is the second and fourth sections of episode 13 that have
the most frequent use of would, and the other three sections of episode 13
are also high in its use. The numbers for could are very similar. The word
appears hardly at all in the early narrative with usage occurring in only
two of the early sections of narrative. In the later narrative, the two
sections with the most frequent use of could are both in episode 13, and
those two sections use could at a rate twice as frequent as the rate in the
third ranked section (which is a section of episode 16); four of the six
sections that use could most frequently are in fact in episode 13. Two
causal conjunctions so and because also appear more frequently in
episode 13 than elsewhere. The most dominant use of so as conjunction
occurs in the first-person narrative of episode 12 where it almost always
begins a sentence. Apart from those three sections, it is the third and
fourth sections of narrative in episode 13 that have the most frequent
occurrence. For the other causal conjunction, because, the four sections
with the highest frequency are all in episode 13, and each of those
sections has virtually double or more the frequency of any other section
in the text. Prepositional phrases introduced by like are another very
distinctive feature of the syntax of this episode. In the twenty-four
sections that make up the eastern part of plot 2A, like appears
infrequently. The most frequent uses of like occur in episode 13. Of the
five sections with the highest frequency of like four of them appear in
episode 13.
3 References for quotations
from Ulysses are to line
3 Discussion numbers in Gabler’s edition
By episode 13 Bloom has arrived at Sandymount shore where he will (Gabler, 1986). We are
observe Gerty MacDowell whose appearance in the first half of the engaged in further detailed
episode provides the first sustained focus in the book on a female analysis of these differences.

Table 4 Ulysses: the sixty-five words, from amongst the ninety-nine most
common words of narrative, that discriminate significantly between our two
groups of episodes on both tests
Rank t-value Degrees of P (t-test) P (Mann–Whitney)
freedom
1 26 or 9.91 37 0.00005 0.00005
2 36 be 8.50 48 0.00005 0.00005
3 77 if 7.71 39 0.00005 0.00005
4 23 had 7.38 51 0.00005 0.00005
5 76 have 7.36 43 0.00005 0.00005
6 20 for (p) 7.19 47 0.00005 0.00005
7 10 to (i) 7.17 52 0.00005 0.00005
8 74 being 7.08 42 0.00005 0.00005
9 11 was 7.01 50 0.00005 0.00005
10 17 from 6.94 36 0.00005 0.00005
11 19 as 6.83 52 0.00005 0.00005
12 57 when 6.80 50 0.00005 0.00005
13 7 his 6.45 20 0.00005 0.00005
14 45 would 6.33 42 0.00005 0.00005
15 87 towards 6.19 20 0.00005 0.00005
16 37 that (c) 6.13 50 0.00005 0.00005
17 25 not 6.10 44 0.00005 0.00005
18 83 been 6.01 46 0.00005 0.00005
19 41 there 5.95 44 0.00005 0.00005
20 2 of 5.93 50 0.00005 0.00005
21 31 which (rp) 5.84 52 0.00005 0.00015
22 39 were 5.84 48 0.00005 0.00005
23 50 eyes 5.78 34 0.00005 0.00005
24 33 that (d) 5.69 52 0.00005 0.00005
25 51 down 5.68 29 0.00005 0.00005
26 49 hand 5.60 18 0.00005 0.00005
27 91 time 5.47 44 0.00005 0.00015
28 92 though 5.30 36 0.00005 0.00005
29 35 but 5.15 51 0.00005 0.00005
30 85 this 5.13 36 0.00005 0.00005
31 70 could 5.02 38 0.00005 0.00005
32 54 who (rp) 4.99 49 0.00005 0.00035
33 79 no (a) 4.71 52 0.00005 0.00015
34 59 through 4.68 23 0.00015 0.00005
35 64 head 4.68 18 0.00025 0.00005
36 82 some 4.63 44 0.00005 0.00065
37 47 over 4.61 20 0.00415 0.01335
38 84 round 4.58 43 0.00005 0.00005
39 96 so (c) 4.54 37 0.00015 0.00015
40 93 hands 4.51 19 0.00025 0.00005
41 63 other 4.43 51 0.00015 0.00045
42 86 hat 4.40 20 0.00035 0.00005
43 67 again 4.33 18 0.00045 0.00005
44 97 because 4.31 36 0.00015 0.00005
45 14 on (p) 4.26 45 0.00015 0.00025
46 68 under 3.94 32 0.00045 0.00025
47 98 voice 3.91 18 0.00105 0.00005
48 5 he 3.90 33 0.00045 0.00065
49 52 back 3.88 24 0.00075 0.00015
50 80 like (p) 3.76 44 0.00055 0.01085
51 62 asked 3.72 17 0.00175 0.00255

Table 4 (Continued)
Rank t-value Degrees of P (t-test) P (Mann–Whitney)
freedom
52 88 turned 3.66 19 0.00175 0.00105
53 65 face 3.63 20 0.00175 0.00025
54 48 about 3.42 48 0.00135 0.01555
55 78 you 3.39 52 0.00135 0.00075
56 66 more 3.32 44 0.00185 0.00285
57 46 that (rp) 3.03 43 0.00415 0.01175
58 24 all 2.85 46 0.00655 0.01535
59 15 by (p) 2.74 50 0.00845 0.03495
60 58 into 2.69 22 0.01305 0.00655
61 94 door 2.63 24 0.01505 0.00415
62 72 man 2.50 52 0.01605 0.03225
63 38 one 2.32 34 0.02705 0.00745
64 28 their 2.16 28 0.04005 0.02915
65 55 did 2.04 40 0.04805 0.00025
(d) = demonstrative; (ap) = adverbial particle; (p) = preposition; (i) = infinitive;

(rp) = relative pronoun; (a) = adjective; (c) = conjunction.
character. This focus comes principally through a third-person narrative

account of Gerty’s world, but the style establishes a tone that often
identifies the narrative’s point of view with Gerty’s. ‘We are’, Senn wrote,
‘treated to a close-up of Gerty’s mind and, simultaneously, are made
aware of the forces that helped to shape it’ (Senn, 1977, p. 309). Lawrence
has since argued that Joyce ‘parodies her sentimental mind by parodying
the second-rate fiction that has nurtured it’ (Lawrence, 1981, p. 120). The
forces to which Senn refers, which include cultural products such as
romantic fiction, ensure that the parody is directed towards a broader
and more significant perspective than this mere young girl: it encom-
passes the social context that produced her. That context offers a range of
styles that the episode imitates, and these different styles—of magazines,
advertising, journalistic advice columns, and romantic fiction—portray
the very limited cultural resources to which Gerty has access. In addition,
there are idioms that mimic Gerty’s natural discourse and that move the
prose between the rhythms, vocabulary, and syntax of that discourse and
the various styles borrowed from printed sources. As Senn argued, the
episode is technically complex, and ‘Not even the style of Gerty’s half is as
monotonous or uniform as critics have assumed’ (Senn, 1977, p. 305).
Indeed, from our analyses too, the five sections of episode 13 on Fig. 2A
range across a relatively large area of the plot compared with most other
episodes, even though the five sections retain a reasonably well-defined
cluster. The range of these sections remains integral to Joyce’s presenta-
tion of the cultural and social context of Gerty’s consciousness, which is
articulated in considerable detail. The dominant forces that govern the
way her identity is presented are her gender, marital status, nationality,
physical handicap, cultural deprivation, low class, and religion. The dis-
course of ‘Nausicaa’ constructs fantasies about this world in which Gerty
lives, and idealized projections of her life figure very prominently. The

tone establishes itself in the opening paragraph in which the described

benevolence of the natural world—‘day lingered lovingly’ and so on—
parallels the beneficence of the Catholic religion, which through Mary is
a protective guide: ‘beacon to the stormtossed heart of man’. Literal
description gives way very quickly to metaphors that generate an affected
discourse. Such stylization sets this narrative apart from the narrative of
earlier episodes; it presents a world view that people such as Gerty have
been inclined to embrace but which readers scarcely will. The redun-
dancy: ‘in the west the sun was setting’; the elaboration: ‘dear old Howth’;
the cliché: ‘last but not least’; and the accumulation of prepositional
phrases expose the emptiness that this rhetorical extravagance attempts
to conceal. The artifice that registers the fantasies that inform this prose
are reflected too in the personification. Investing emotion in physical
objects foreshadows the facile projection of desires into which Gerty has
been tempted. Just as Gerty will fantasize about her dream romance, so
does this narrative fantasize about proud Howth and the loving day. But
the parody depends equally upon the perception that in the social context
inhabited by a Gerty there exists a widespread lack of awareness of the
affectation of this. It’s an affectation that sustains a politics of obeisance
and passivity, and that fosters Gerty’s delusions about social and eco-
nomic opportunity.
The fantasy about Gerty’s social position becomes more powerfully
developed when the narrative turns to the claim that ‘There was an innate
refinement, a languid queenly hauteur about Gerty’ (96–97). Through
the remainder of that paragraph we confront the naïve and futile
optimism of Gerty’s mind. The narrative returns to the opening idea of
beneficent external agency: ‘kind fate’, that might have made Gerty into a
‘gentlewoman of high degree’, one who would have received the ‘good
education’ that Gerty’s social position excludes, and one who would
receive ‘patrician suitors’. The politics of class govern her yearnings but
this ideology maintains her obeisance and clouds her ability to see the
inexorable poverty of her future. The narrative’s vacuous phrasings: ‘in
her own right’, grasp forlornly at credibility but accentuate only the gap
between what Gerty yearns for and what she can expect. Much of that
yearning, of course, revolves around the desire for a husband, and the
dreaming about gowns and jewels masks the dire economic context that
so reduced the potential for women in Ireland to achieve one form of
economic support through marriage. As the narrative turns to Gerty’s
appearance, her eyes are described as possessing a ‘charm few could
resist’ but this rhetorical formula, so hackneyed, cannot deflect us from
the awareness that all of the potential suitors about whom Gerty dreams
have in fact very successfully resisted her charm. Gerty’s head has been
filled by advice in magazines such as the Princess Novelette. As Kershner
states:
Gerty MacDowell’s apparent possession . . . by the guiding

consciousness of The Lamplighter and The Princess Novelette
certainly has its comic side, but it has a tragic aspect as well; like a

cut-rate Madame Bovary or Julien Sorel, she has been painfully

misled by her reading, indeed lamed by it (Kershner, 1989, p. 2).
Following the advice of such magazines is scarcely how one becomes one
of the ‘leaders of fashion’ (112). The idea of Gerty’s eminence is most
sharply undermined when the paragraph concludes with the absurdly
extravagant claim ‘that of a surety God’s fair land of Ireland did not hold
her equal’ (122).
Whilst the narrative creates her as an independent figure with a
personal consciousness, it also creates her as a figure whose conscious-
ness is dependent upon social discourses, a dependency that Bakhtin sees
as integral to identity. Some of the key ways in which the text com-
municates this are through the distinctive words that we have identified
and the structures that accompany them: the prepositional phrases
beginning with like, the two causal connectives, and the modals. Whilst
these are all integral to the articulation of her social consciousness,
modality most strongly governs her relationship with the languages that
define her. Various syntactic forms, however, reinforce this definition.
When she looks, for example, at the Christmas almanac and at the man
she supposes ‘a thorough aristocrat’, the informal but rather clumsy
syntax expresses the cultural relationship between Gerty and the
narrative:
She often looked at them dreamily when she went there for a
certain purpose and felt her own arms that were white and soft just
like hers with the sleeves back and thought about those times
because she had found out in Walker’s pronouncing dictionary
that belonged to grandpapa Giltrap about the halcyon days what
they meant (339–44).
The narrative casts her language in the syntactic form of cultural

inferiority and at the same time exposes her mistaken assumption that
she understands ‘halcyon days’, for she has a very superficial response
and clearly the political ideology escapes her.
When the narrative about Gerty turns to a prepositional phrase
introduced by like, it is almost always to suggest the extent to which the
comparisons she makes are misguided, or unconvincing. When these
comparisons involve assertiveness, the judgements made by the narrat-
ive, but which again we associate with Gerty, are based on her sense of
what is ladylike and fashionable. She is critical of Cissy Caffrey ‘running
like that’; denigrates Cissy’s blouse: ‘like a rag’; and her petticoat: ‘like a
caricature’; and is dismissive of Edy Boardman, ‘with her specs like an old
maid’ (522), and who says ‘things like that she knew would wound like
the confounded little cat she was’ (580–1). She adopts a moralizing tone
in much of this, projecting herself as not ‘like other flighty girls’ (436)
despite the fact that she declares herself madly in love with a man to
whom she has never spoken and whom she is happy to excite sexually.
Many of the like phrases invoke the misguided fantasies that are also
associated with the modal expressions. In the arms of the ‘manly man’

that she desires it ‘would be like heaven’. She imagines Bloom embracing
her ‘like a real man’ (439) though ironically Bloom later colours ‘like a
girl’ (743); she imagines Bloom a man ‘like no-one else’; she projects a
view of him as a ‘gentleman like that’ (487) and one who has perhaps
suffered a tragedy ‘like the nobleman with the foreign name from the
land of song’ (657–8). This discourse exposes a set of social relationships
with women in which her views are unbalanced, and a set of relationships
with men, hypothesized though these are in the main, in which she
demonstrates a potentially dangerous vulnerability. Subject at home to
the abuse of a drunken and violent father, she seduces herself much too
easily when she looks upon the unknown Bloom.
For the most part the conjunction so functions in a regular manner,
and explains why something will occur. It does introduce a metaphoric
clause of defiance: ‘so they could put that in their pipe and smoke it’
(604); and it does introduce a clause that projects the view of Gerty that
Gerty would like to believe in but that we can scarcely credit: ‘but she was
ever ladylike in her deportment so she simply passed it off with
consummate tact’ (618–19). With because, however, the causality that we
expect to find is often flawed or lacking—as Senn has pointed out (Senn,
1977, p. 301). Gerty’s explanations occasionally don’t explain. Because
sometimes appears when the syntax of the sentence has broken down, as
though the implied causality of because will somehow overcome the
syntactic defect and create a link that will put the detached clauses back
into a grammatical relationship:
He was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and
thought could she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral
design for him as a present or a clock but they had a clock she
noticed on the mantelpiece white and gold with a canarybird that
came out of a little house to tell the time the day she went there
about the flowers for the forty hours’ adoration because it was hard
to know what sort of a present to give or perhaps an album of
illuminated views of Dublin or some place (459–65).
In order to make sense of this sentence, the conjunctive because needs to

be read as relating back to her thoughts about what present to give—the
teacosy, the clock. Its grammatical link has been interrupted by the
commentary relating to the clock. A similar breakdown occurs in another
sentence:
She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own
colour and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on
her because the green she wore that day week brought grief because
his father brought him in to study for the intermediate exhibition
and because she thought perhaps he might be out because when
she was dressing that morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on
her inside out and that was for luck and lovers’ meeting if you put
those things on inside out or if they got untied that he was thinking
about you so long as it wasn’t of a Friday (179–87).

The first two uses, ‘because the green’ and ‘because his father’, maintain
the syntax, though the first of these confounds causality and superstition;
the next one does not maintain the syntax. The clause ‘because she
thought perhaps’ needs to link with the opening clause: ‘She was wearing
the blue for luck’. In other uses of because, Gerty’s expressed causality is
often unconvincing: ‘because Gerty could see without looking’; ‘her
dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him’ (431);
‘because she knew about the passion of men’ (699). Nor can because
compensate for circular reasoning in the first two clauses of a sentence
such as this:
But this was altogether different from a thing like that because
there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw
her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips
(706–8).
Moreover, the reader must strongly doubt whether there is any
difference. What the lodger was doing when we are told that it was
‘something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed’
(705–6) is not, we might well infer, any different from what Bloom is
doing.
But it is the narrative’s recourse to modality that dominates. Modality
expresses Gerty’s dialogic relationships as potentiality. Her ideas and
desires become hypothesized through modal expression that enables her
perhaps to avoid confronting directly the lack of the social relationships
that she desires and the pain of her powerlessness. The use of could and
would are the most frequent expressions of this modality in this episode.
Gerty’s hands were ‘as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could
make them’ (90). Lawrence has pointed out how the
description of Gerty incorporates clichés of romantic fiction such
as ‘finely veined alabaster’, but it implicitly contrasts them with
phrases like ‘lemonjuice’ and ‘queen of ointments’ which come
from the advertisements in ladies’ magazines. The pretense behind
Gerty’s self-image is exposed (Lawrence, 1981, p. 121).
The modal form makes a significant contribution to our perception of
the pretence that is implied in the lexicals, for, as used here, it reinforces
the low probability of achieving the whiteness desired for conformity to
fashion. When Gerty is further described as ‘as fair a specimen of
winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see’ (80–81), the modality
casts irony upon the expectation, and this is reinforced by the rather
incongruous use of ‘specimen’ as if Gerty were some kind of scientific
exhibit. The most prominent desire is for a ‘dream romance’. ‘If she saw
that magic lure in his eyes there would be no holding back for her. Love
laughs at locksmiths. She would make the great sacrifice. Her every effort
would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she
be to him and gild his days with happiness’ (652–55); and ‘She would
follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her
all in all, the only man in all the world for her to love was the master

guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild,
untrammelled, free’ (670–73). In this episode, Joyce uses modalization to
grammaticalize the aspiration that makes Gerty unconsciously complicit
in her own repression and exploitation. The metaphor of sacrifice, for
example, reaffirms her subjugation, exposing the vacuousness of her wish
that ‘she would be wild, untrammelled, free’ (673). The modality in that
last clause adds to our perception of irony: she will, in reality, be none of
those things. The narrative sentences construct a complex point of view
in which there exists a tension between what a reader might interpret as
the narrative’s view and what a reader might interpret as the view of
Gerty projected in the narrative. The modal forms remain integral to this
tension which is concentrated on the chasm between what we suppose
will happen to Gerty and what she would like to happen. Her dream will
not translate into event. The verb ‘gild’ accentuates the world of fiction
from which her dreams come, and they collapse in the hyperbole of
‘Dearer than the whole world’. It is a hyperbole used earlier too: ‘the story
of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given
worlds to know what it was’ (421–23). The certainty and assurance that
Gerty tries to acquire as she seeks to bolster the dream is undermined by
modality, which here serves to enforce the extent to which the dream is
created in her mind. As Halliday argues: ‘The importance of modal
features in the grammar of interpersonal exchanges lies in an apparent
paradox on which the entire system rests—the fact that we only say we
are certain when we are not’ (Halliday, 1994, p. 362).
Throughout the narrative about Gerty, the ideology of conformity is
partly expressed through the modal forms—‘because it was expected in
the Lady’s Pictorial that electric blue would be worn’ (151)—that re-
inforce the social control exerted over Gerty’s mind. She buys something
‘slightly shopsoiled but you would never notice’ (160) in which the
modal expresses what she wants to believe but a reader might well sup-
pose that her assurance goes beyond what the facts justify. Similarly,
when she does want to express some defiance—‘And when she put it on
the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that would take the shine
out of some people she knew’ (163–4)—the modal again introduces the
low level of probability that her expected result will be realized. Gerty’s
defiance is asserted again in the claim, relating to Wylie, that ‘she could
just chuck him aside’, which is scarcely compatible with the ‘sob that
came to her throat’ when Edy reminds her of him. Later we read that
‘never again would she cast as much as a second thought on him’ (595–6)
and that she ‘could give him one look of measured scorn that would
make him shrivel up on the spot’ (597–8). The modals convey the im-
probability of this ever occurring. They expose her lack of power, the
elusiveness of dignity, the subordination and dependence that her assert-
iveness ironically betrays.
Her romantic aspirations conform also to literary metaphors: ‘His
eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and
through, read her very soul’. The modal adds to the improbability of this.
The narrative adopts an ironic perspective on Bloom’s gaze; for whereas

Gerty can believe that Bloom is interested in ‘her very soul’ whilst he
watches her and masturbates, the narrative cannot. The narrative shows
us the discrepancy between Gerty’s perspective and what we understand
to be Bloom’s interest. That perspective of Gerty comes from a head full
of such phrases from her reading of romantic fiction—also the target of
Joyce’s parody: ‘she knew that he could be trusted to the death, steadfast,
a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips’ (693–4)—the
very fingertips masturbating. Naively, she projects Bloom as a figure of
some heroic drama and fantasizes about her power. This intoxication
carries over into her desires for her own literary creation, where this time
the modal could reinforces the sense of fantasy that comes from her
feeling that
she too could write poetry if she could only express herself like that
poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had copied out of the
newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. Art thou real
my ideal? it was called (643–46).
The self-deceptions generated by her reading and the distance between

her thought and cultural reality emerge in part from the irony in the
modals. Again, when the narrative asserts that ‘you could see there was a
story’ behind the picture in the Christmas almanac, we don’t suppose
that the story, apparently of ‘oldtime chivalry’, is anything other than
utterly remote from Gerty’s experience—where there’s no evidence of
‘gentlemen’.
These two modal auxiliaries, then, are formal properties of the text
that appear sufficiently frequently to form the basis of statistical analyses
and that can also be interpreted as integral to form and meaning. In the
particular ways in which they are used in ‘Nausicaa’, they support the
arguments of Hasan and Bakhtin that any separation of form and
meaning should be rejected. In the work of Bakhtin, in particular, the
ideological value of formal differences has long been emphasized. In
‘Discourse in the Novel’, he argued for the need to overcome the divorce
between the formal and ideological:
We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical

categories but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated,
language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, ensuring a
maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 271).
Bakhtin, to borrow Hale’s phrase, conceives ‘ideological value as linguistic

social relation’ (Hale, 1998, p. 125). It is important to the argument of
this article that such relation, as presented in Bakhtin’s discussion of
dialogization, impacts not merely upon semantics but upon syntax, for
he claims that dialogization has a role in ‘reformulating the semantics
and syntactical structure of discourse’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 284). This is the
point at which the common words of our plots require consideration for,
as our analyses demonstrate, these words are integral to the various

syntactic structures that differentiate styles, and in that differentiating

role they contribute both to the form and meaning of the text.
The kinds of discriminations that allow us to differentiate at very high
levels of statistical significance between the styles of Ulysses can be further
contextualized by Bakhtin’s discussion of polyphony. In Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin writes:
The author of a polyphonic novel is not required to renounce
himself or his own consciousness, but he must to an extraordinary
extent broaden, deepen and rearrange this consciousness (to be
sure, in a specific direction) in order to accommodate the
autonomous consciousnesses of others (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 68).
Commentators such as Booth have recognized the applicability of this to
Joyce’s work, and Booth has also attached a very high value to what he
sees as the liberation of characters in polyphonic novels, for these
characters, he argues, have the ‘freedom to say what they will, in their
own way’ (Bakhtin, 1984, xxii). For him, the result of multiple points of
view, the presentation of ‘the essential, irreducible multi-centeredness,
or “polyphony”, of human life’ (xx), overcomes the narrowness of an
individual point of view and thus ‘transcends the author’s voice’ (xxiv)
by providing voices ‘that are not reduced into, or suppressed by, a single
authoritative voice’ (xxii). This transcending of the author’s voice
appears to assume for Booth an ethical value, for it ‘is not a handbook
treatment of the technical means to specific artistic effects; it is rather part
of a lifetime inquiry into profound questions about the entire enterprise
of thinking about what human life means’ (xxiv). The strength of the
stylistic discriminations revealed by our analyses reinforces the concept
of polyphony by presenting the distinctive features of, for example, each
character’s interior monologue which shows that Joyce did indeed create
for his characters ‘their own way’ of communicating. The shift from
polyphony to ethics depends upon the value attached to the different
ideologies contained within the different idiolects and the different
narrative styles, for these create the range of perspectives that expand the
book’s cultural context. Authors of polyphonic novels do much more
than experiment with languages, and the presentation of the varying
ideologies displays a commitment to move beyond the individual so as to
consider broader social concerns. In Lodge’s formulation, ‘There is an
indissoluble link in Bakhtin’s theory between the linguistic variety of
prose fiction, which he called heteroglossia, and its cultural function as
the continuous critique of all repressive, authoritarian, one-eyed ideo-
logies’ (Lodge, 1990, p. 22).
In another way, the supplementation that Booth describes can also
manifest itself in narrative as a ‘choral vitality, the very same words
conveying two or more speaking voices’ (xxii). The distinctiveness of the
narrative of an episode derives not merely from one individual voice but
from the complex of interrelations between the range of voices
articulated in the episode. These interrelations produce the dual focus,
for example, on the subjectivity of Gerty and that of the unidentified

narrator as the narrative of the particular episode unfolds. It illustrates

well Bakhtin’s argument:
Thanks to the ability of a language to represent another language
while still retaining the capacity to sound simultaneously both
outside it and within it, to talk about it and at the same time to talk
in and with it—and thanks to the ability of the language being
represented simultaneously to serve as an object of representation
while continuing to be able to speak to itself—thanks to all this, the
creation of specific novelistic images of languages becomes possible
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 358).
It also becomes possible to conceptualize choral vitality much more
richly within the context of the discriminations of style that our plots
figure. These discriminations, which depend of course upon the kind of
statistical analysis that is only feasible with the aid of computing, take our
understanding of form and meaning into details of a text that would not
otherwise be available and in this humanities computing makes a
distinctive contribution to literary criticism.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the support and assistance of our colleagues in The
University of Newcastle’s Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing,
Faculty of Arts and Social Science. We also express our thanks to
Professor H. W. Gabler, who supplied us with a machine-readable text of
Ulysses. The Australian Research Council, and The University of New-
castle, NSW, have provided financial support for this research.
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LLC16/4 pp.

353-373 FINAL 4/2/02 11:05 am Page 353

The Statistical Analysis of Style:

C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia

component analysis as well as distribution tests such as Student’s t-test

the dichotomy between form and meaning is rejected . . . different

354 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001

Statistical Analysis of Style in Ulysses

same thing. How we say is indicative of how we mean. And a

2 Method and Results

Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001 355

C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia

certainty and which therefore requires an exercise of judgement; equally

356 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001

Statistical Analysis of Style in Ulysses

shows the relationships between narrative, dialogue, and interior

Table 1 Sections of interior monologue, narrative and dialogue (within episodes

Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001 357

C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia

Fig. 1 (A) Ulysses: narrative,

358 Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001

Statistical Analysis of Style in Ulysses

Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2001 359

C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia

Table 2 Ulysses: the ninety-nine most common words

(a) = adjective; (ad) = adverb; (ap) = adverbial particle; (c) = conjunction;

part form a series of distinct sub-groups—save for the separation

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Table 3 Ulysses: the ninety-nine most common words of narrative

Fig. 2 (A) Ulysses: narrative

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C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia

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(d) = demonstrative; (ap) = adverbial particle; (p) = preposition; (i) = infinitive;

character. This focus comes principally through a third-person narrative

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tone establishes itself in the opening paragraph in which the described

Gerty MacDowell’s apparent possession . . . by the guiding

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cut-rate Madame Bovary or Julien Sorel, she has been painfully

The narrative casts her language in the syntactic form of cultural

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In order to make sense of this sentence, the conjunctive because needs to

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C. W. F. McKenna and A. Antonia

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The self-deceptions generated by her reading and the distance between

We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical

Bakhtin, to borrow Hale’s phrase, conceives ‘ideological value as linguistic

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syntactic structures that differentiate styles, and in that differentiating

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