Vocabulary decay in category

romance

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............................................................................................................................................................
Jack Elliott
Centre for Literary and Linquistic Computing, University
of Newcastle, Australia
.......................................................................................................................................
Abstract
Writers of a best-selling category romance imprint share a common tendency to
decrease their deployment of unique words over the span of their novels—a
phenomenon of ‘vocabulary decay’. This tendency cannot be found in the
Correspondence: novels of Jane Austen, suggesting this drop is not intrinsic to the romance
Jack Elliott, Centre for genre itself, and is unlikely to have any true narrative purpose. A study of
Literary and Linquistic Charles Dickens shows that vocabulary decay extends beyond the romance
Computing, University of genre. Closer examination reveals vocabulary decay is a result of progressive
Newcastle, Australia.
E-mail: 結論
amounts of linguistic chunking—due to author fatigue or a desire to produce
jack.elliott@uon.edu.au. a more readable narrative.
.................................................................................................................................................................................

1 Introduction ‘international settings from your every fantasy’

Romance is the most popular genre in the world,
accounting for 14.3% of all fiction sold in 2011
(Romance Writers of America, 2012). The most ef-
ficient definition of a romance is given by Pamela
Regis: ‘A romance novel is a work of prose fiction
that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of
one or more heroines’ (Regis, 2003, p. 27).1
If romance is the most popular genre in the
world, the most popular publisher of romance is
Harlequin, which sells one book every five seconds,
into 94 markets worldwide, in 25 different languages
(Harlequin, 2012a). Harlequin specializes in the
publication of branded romantic fiction, so-called
category romances, and none of its categories is
more popular, or more prolific, than Harlequin
Presents. No other romance category from any pub-
lisher releases as many titles every month and only
one (Harlequin Romance) has a longer history.
Harlequin Presents novels are shorter-form fic-
tion of roughly 50,000 words each that promises
‘captivating internal emotional conflicts’ in
(Harlequin, 2012b). This is romance in an almost
archetypal sense with an emphasis on the social class
of the hero: ‘There’s nothing in the world his
powerful authority and money can’t buy’
(Harlequin, 2012b). Although the authorship is
relatively diverse—writers range from young to
old, New Zealand to Canada—all must conform
to the expectations of their readership and submit
to the demands of the publisher.
Although criticism of the romance genre has
traditionally focused on debates locating the genre
within a feminist context (Makinen, 2001), in recent
years it has moved to evaluating the novels as works
of art in their own right (Selinger, 2007, p. 310).
Statistical analysis of romance novels has shown
that the genre is well marked and stable (Dillon,
2007, p. 181). It has also shown that different cate-
gories employ distinctive rhetorical stances in their
language (Opas-Hänninen and Tweedie, 1999,
pp. 97–8). The large quantity, well-defined nature,
popularity, and international reach are the primary
reasons for studying Harlequin Presents.

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J. Elliott
Studies of the Harlequin bibliographic data
reveal twin impulses of diversity and conformity.
On the one hand, novels are written around the
globe by thousands of women2 who differ by gen-
erational cohort, national origin, and level of formal
education. On the other, publication is controlled
by a single editorial group in one country. Studying
category romance begs the question as to which
must be accorded greater significance—the mono-
lithic nature of the publisher and the strict rules of
the category or the diversity of the authors and the
readership.
As a typical Harlequin Presents novel progresses,
the working vocabulary contracts. This phenom-
enon, a sort of ‘vocabulary decay’, is driven by
either the rapid speed of composition or the popular
nature of the genre. Tight economic conditions
imposed by Harlequin place a premium on the
rapid completion of a novel. In this model, writers
make their language less and less unique as they
hurry through their novel, jettisoning vocabulary
variation as they go. Vocabulary decay may also
be a deliberate strategy to maintain a rapid
narrative pace. Words that obscure understanding,
or are potentially difficult are metered down by
the author as they seek to keep their readership
engaged.
The most extreme example of vocabulary decay
can be found in Sheikh Without A Heart, by Sandra
Marton.3 In this case, the first section of the novel is
consumed with extensive descriptions of surround-
ings and characters, whereas later segments are given
over to long stretches of repetitive dialogue. Here, for
example, is the second line of the novel, a reflection
on the desert at night from the hero, Sheikh Karim al
Safir, as he gazes out the window of his jet:
Black silk sky. Stars as brilliant as bonfires. An
ivory moon that cast a milky glow over the
endless sea of sand (Marton, 2012).
And here is the second last line of Sheikh Without
A Heart, the response from the heroine to the pro-
posal of the hero:
‘Yes’, she said ‘yes, yes, yes-’ (Marton, 2012)
The hero of Sheikh Without A Heart is the
handsome, dutiful Karim, who broods over the
322 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016
deserts of the South-Western United States in the
first chapter:
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Alcantar was thousands of miles away and its
endless miles of gently undulating sand ended
at the turquoise waters of the Persian Sea.
(Marton, 2012)
Deserts are mentioned throughout the novel, but
the special vocabulary is reduced until, in the final
chapter, they serve only as window dressing (only
the words ‘overhead’ and ‘fan’ are unique to this
part of the novel):
She woke abruptly, alone in a strange room, with
a ceiling fan turning high overhead, rain pounding
against the arched windows.
Rain in the desert.
It seemed appropriate.
She sat up and pushed her hair from her face
(Marton, 2012)
The effect of vocabulary decay is observable,
though at a weaker scale, in the work of Charles
Dickens, who was also known to write quickly for
a wide audience. It is not observable in the work of
Jane Austen, who wrote at a more leisurely pace for
a more limited readership. The fact that Dickens
displays this effect while Austen does not suggests
there is nothing intrinsic to the romance novel
about vocabulary decay.
2 Methodology
As data 181 texts from the Harlequin Presents back
catalogue were downloaded from the Harlequin store
(these were all originally published between 2000
and 2012). Principal components analysis revealed
that the three novellas in the sample were very
different from the others in the language they
used. The novellas were then set aside, yielding 178
novels.
Some novels used US spelling, whereas others
used British spelling. All spelling was normalized
to US spelling by running the standard, open-
source Aspell application twice on the novels; once
using the British English dictionary, and again using
the US dictionary. This provided two lists, and

where the lists could not agree on a spelling, a North
American spelling was used. Novels were then
stripped of their preamble (table of contents and
author biography) and postscript (copyright
notice).
Custom software based on the GATE system
(Cunningham et al., 2011) was then used to extract
each word in every novel and associate it with a
location within the file4. Each novel was then cut
into 100 separate segments based on its overall
length. These segments were populated by an even
number of words. At the end of this process, each
word for every novel was associated with a segment
number, ranging from 1 (the first segment) to 100
(the last). Each segment in every novel contained
roughly 600 words.
Each word was then associated with a string of
100 numbers, representing how many times that
word appeared each segment of every novel. A
word appearing only in the first segment of a
single novel would be represented by the number
one, followed by ninety-nine zeros. A word appear-
ing twice in the second segment of two novels would
be represented by the number zero in the first pos-
ition, four in the second, then ninety-eight zeros,
and so on.
The Shannon Entropy of every segment was then
calculated using maximum likelihood, and the
means and standard deviations plotted in Fig. 1.
Entropy is a measure of disorder, and when applied
to word counts is a measure of vocabulary ‘rich-
ness’: The higher the entropy, the wider the vocabu-
lary range. Unlike a typical stylometric study, we are
focused here on the range of words used rather than
the nature of the words themselves.
The average entropy declines as a novel pro-
gresses, showing the vocabulary becoming less di-
verse. Although each segment has the same total
number of words, segments have progressively
fewer and fewer different types of word. In other
words, working vocabulary contracts over the
course of these novels, with the exception of the
final segment, which re-inflates the vocabulary
slightly.
This effect is very strong throughout the genre.
Only two novels—The Millionaire Affair and The
Costerella Contract—do not exhibit this trend.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016
Vocabulary decay in category romance
Note that decreasing the number of segments to
10 evenly sized bins and recalculating the entropy
makes the effect even stronger. Both The Millionaire
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Affair and The Costerella Contract remained nega-
tively correlated.
3 Changing Nature of Vocabulary
Table 1 summarizes the top 30 words found only in
the first segment of any novel. The second column
shows how many novels use this word only in the
first segment, and not thereafter.
The most obvious similarity of these words is
that they have to do with introductions, or are pri-
marily words associated with the billionaires, sheiks,
and playboys who provide the magnetic attraction
at the heart of these novels. The second most obvi-
ous trend in the words is their very low frequency—
these are, at most, shared between six novels, not
throughout the genre as a whole.
The lack of physical description in these words is
surprising—critics acknowledge that physical de-
scriptions mark out the romance genre (Dillon,
2007, p. 173)—but they are not unique to the first
segment of the novel. These words seem more intent
on socially positioning the hero and heroine. Words
such as ‘financial’, ‘impressive’, ‘corporate’, and
‘owned’ dominate the list. Few physical description
words either have a social connotation (‘aristo-
cratic’, ‘broad-shouldered’) or are equally likely to
be heroine words as hero words (‘dark-haired’,
‘British’).
The submissions guidelines suggest that
Harlequin Presents is often thought of as being a
genre about billionaires and oligarchs (Harlequin,
2012b). The uniqueness of these particular words
modifies this understanding—the genre includes
millionaires and Greek shipping tycoons, but is
about the love story between hero and heroine.
The first segment of the novel brings the social set-
ting into focus: The hero’s wealth and power are
central at this point in the novel—but they will
drift to the sidelines for the rest of the novel. The
physical attributes of the hero will recur again in the
novel, as he works his charms on the heroine (or
succumbs to hers).
323
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J. Elliott

5.2

5.0

4.8

entropy (nats)

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Fig. 1 Box plot of Shannon Entropy of each segment. Curve has been fitted with Friedman’s supersmoother through the mean of each segment. X-axis are
segments from 1 (the first) to 100 (the last)

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 Vocabulary decay in category romance

Table 1 Words unique to first segments level of a phrase, and that the brain has frequent
recourse to producing the same type of chunk over
Word Number of novels
and over again, in a phenomenon known as ‘syn-

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Dark-haired 6
tactic priming’. Lancashire describes syntactic prim-
Fail 6
Arrival 5 ing as ‘the tendency that uttering one syntactic
Exclusive 5 construction increases the chances that the same
Loaded 5 grammatical structure, or a related one, will be
Offices 5 used again soon’ (Lancashire, 2010, p. 83).
Surveyed 5
Aristocratic 4
N-Grams appear to be a useful proxy for this sort
Assessing 4 of syntactic chunk. Although studies of syntactic
British 4 priming in action typically restrain themselves to
Broad-shouldered 4 only a single author (Lancashire, 2010, pp. 116–93),
Corporate 4
or a handful of patterns (Gries, 2005, p. 366), no
Employees 4
Enter 4 such luxury is afforded to a study of romance nov-
Financial 4 elists as a group, as there is no consensus on what
Fools 4 linguistic tricks they may prefer. N-Grams are a way
Freedom 4 to extract sequences from the text without prejud-
Groomed 4
Heads 4 ging any findings.
Ill 4 N-Grams were extracted from the Harlequin
Impressive 4 novels used in previous sections. A sequence of
Magazine 4 three tokens taken together defined a single
Major 4
N-Gram. The N-Grams included punctuation, as
Manicured 4
Mission 4 this would seem to be relevant information.
Owned 4 N-Grams were assigned to segments in exactly the
Polish 4 same way as individual words. Taking this informa-
Revealing 4 tion, the number of unique N-Grams per segment was
Services 4
Smart 4 calculated, and averaged out over the novels. This in-
formation is plotted in Fig. 2. As the number of
unique words declines throughout the novels, so
does the number of unique sequences of words.
Although the function of the first segment serves If chunks of text are repeated throughout these
to explain why it has some unique words, it does not novels, a quick examination of the most frequent
explain the composition of the rest of the novel. chunks will show whether this is an example of syn-
tactic priming and not a more complex phenom-
3.1 Progressive linguistic chunking enon. After taking all N-Grams in every novel, those
In fact, unique words in the first segment of a appearing in less than 100 novels were discarded.
Harlequin Presents novel are crowded out by se- The remainder N-grams were then sorted by the
quences of more common words, especially those average number of segments in which they ap-
used to coordinate dialogue. Any given sequence peared. Table 2 shows the top 30 most used
of words typically has a much lower chance of ap- N-Grams across all Harlequin novels in the sample.
pearing than those words taken individually, so In the later sections of the novels, unique words
comparisons of these sequences is likely to produce are crowded out by sequences of common text.
a more readily interpretable result (Manning and Many of these are used to coordinate speech—but
Schutze, 1999, pp. 191–228). These sequences are in each case, this speech has a very strongly inter-
known as N-grams. personal quality. Dialogue now flows directly on,
Neuroscience supports the idea that language is from one character to another (row 1). The speech
produced in chunks of a certain size, beneath the is declarative in nature (row 2). Questions are being

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016 325

J. Elliott

0.74

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proportion of unique ngrams

0.72

0.70

0.68

0.66

20 40 60 80
segments

Fig. 2 Mean number of unique three-count N-Grams per segment

asked (row 4) by heroes (row 14) and heroines (row Here is the introduction of the hero (note the
12). Although romance is notable for the way its many parallels with the words from Table 1):
writers avoid using ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ (Dillon,
‘I’m Loukas Christakis’, he announced, strid-
2007, p. 183), rows 17 and 18 show that this ten-
ing towards her. Supremely confident and
dency tends to decline throughout a novel.
self-assured, he moved with surprising grace
Fragments such as ‘he was’, ‘she had’, and ‘it was’
for such a big man. He was well over six feet
also display evidence of priming. They also suggest tall, Belle estimated, and narrow-hipped, his
that writers have a greater recourse to ‘telling’ rather long legs encased in faded denims that
than ‘showing’ the action. This appears to violate an moulded his powerful thighs. Through his
aesthetic principle of romance writing to show close-fitting black tee shirt she could see the
rather than tell the action (De Geest and Goris, delineation of his abdominal muscles, and
2010, p. 97). In some cases, the author may have the shirt’s vee-shaped neckline revealed an ex-
developed a narrative velocity so fast that mere panse of bronzed skin and wiry black chest
showing is no longer enough. hair. (Shaw, 2012)
The other striking N-Gram here is the triple per-
iod—‘. . .’. This is employed when a character is ‘lost After the Greek Affair, like Sheikh Without A
for words’ or ‘trails off’ at the end of a sentence, Heart, and like our N-Gram data would suggest,
leaving their utterance unfinished. The narrative moves from more descriptive prose to long strings
voice sometimes deploys this usage, but the triple of interpersonal dialogue:
period is more frequently coordinated with speech ‘You wanted me to give up Wedding Belle,
(row 13). Perhaps this is an example of the inter- didn’t you? But why?’ she asked desperately.
ruption of syntactic flow where the writer, like his or ‘I made it clear that I would always put the
her characters, is unable to go on. babies first’. She drew a shuddering breath,
One novel with a very strong decay—After the pain and anger ripping through her. ‘I
Greek Affair, by Chantelle Shaw—starts as strongly thought you were different than John. I
descriptive, with dialogue, either using more im- thought I could trust you. But you are just
aginative inquit tags or eliding them altogether. like him. You want your own way, and you

326 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016

 Vocabulary decay in category romance

Table 2 N-grams shared between segments added the repetitive nature of some of the dialogue
(often a question, frequently a declarative). It is pos-
N-gram Average Number
sible that this is a result of tiredness on the part of

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(delimited with dashes) number of of novels
segments the writer—laboratory studies of syntactic priming
1 .-’-’ 68.70 141 typically control for tiredness (Hartsuiker and Kolk,
2 .-’-i 68.39 145 1998, p. 229). Additionally, evidence from brain
3 .-.-. 56.10 176 scanning studies shows that neural activity decays
4 ? -’-’ 50.19 140 with overstimulation of any one area, and fatigue in
5 ,-’-she 50.10 140
6 ,-’-he 48.27 141
individual neurons is one possible explanation
7 .-’-you 45.30 142 (Grill-Spector et al., 2006, pp. 18–19).
8 .-’-she 44.34 141 There is another explanation for this phenom-
9 .-’-he 44.01 142 enon—writing in the neurological models is also
10 ’-’-i 37.57 140 reading (Lancashire, 2010, p. 100). Just as it is
11 .-it-was 36.03 178
12 ? -’-she 33.25 140
easier to write a sentence by reusing a syntactic
13 .-.-’ 32.11 141 unit, such a sentence is easier to read because the
14 ? -’-he 30.80 141 reader has previously been exposed to that
15 .-’-it 29.40 141 structure.
16 ’-i-’m 29.21 142
These results should be approached with caution:
17 ’-she-said 28.40 138
18 ’-he-said 28.01 140 the science is still young, and consensus is not yet
19 i-do-n’t 27.98 176 fully formed. The exact role fatigue plays in either
20 her-.-’ 26.08 140 reading or writing is yet to be authoritatively
21 .-she-was 25.69 178 determined.
22 .-’-and 25.35 140
23 .-’-the 24.10 140
24 she-did-n’t 23.87 175 3.2 Category romance writers
25 him-.-’ 22.34 140
Romance writers must write quickly because they
26 .-he-was 21.87 178
27 .-’-what 21.07 141 write so much. For Harlequin Presents, the most
28 .-she-had 20.55 178 important ‘super-authors’ are responsible for most
29 .-she-’d 20.27 161 of Harlequin’s line-up (Elliott, 2014). Some writers
30 ’-’-you 19.94 140 do not even stay in the same imprint, but publish
two or three novels annually in each imprint to
which they are committed (Krentz, 2011).
don’t care who you hurt as long as you are in
This tendency is exaggerated by the economics of
control’. (Shaw, 2012)
the situation, and writers of category romances see
Vocabulary decay stretches beyond the increasing themselves as businessmen and businesswomen
use of dialogue. Here is a paragraph from the final (Krentz, 1992, p. 3). Novels must be written for a
section of After the Greek Affair that uses only words particular category from very early in the writing
found elsewhere in the novel—note the high density process (De Geest and Goris, 2010, p. 100), and
of function words: such a novel will have limited use if it is rejected
by the targeted publisher.5 The terms of the con-
He reached for her hand, and after a second
tracts are typically one-sided, and the authors are
she slipped her fingers in his and allowed him
not always well paid for each novel (Flesch, 2004,
to lead her down to the shore, where lazy
p. 63). From this perspective, it makes sense for a
waves rippled onto the sand. (Shaw, 2012)
romance writer to minimize the investment of time
As a typical Harlequin Presents novel progresses, in a product that may be rejected, or for which they
its language grows less unique, there is more dia- may be paid very little.
logue, and the number of stock phrases ‘he was’, If the writers write quickly to make money and
‘she had’ increases. To these stock phrases can be minimize their risk, they also write quickly to satisfy

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016 327

J. Elliott
a market. This market is insatiable—a global phe-
nomenon with over 127 different markets that con-
sumes the entire Harlequin line of thousands of
novels, plus all single-title romantic fiction in add-
ition to blockbuster breakouts such as Twilight and
Fifty Shades of Grey (Elliott, 2014). The form of ro-
mance found in the categories is designed to be
enjoyed quickly, suggesting that vocabulary decay
can be viewed as a successful narrative strategy.
3.3 Vocabulary decay in context
There are two alternative explanations for vocabu-
lary decay. It is either an artefact of the rapid writing
of the texts or it is a product of the genre itself.
These possibilities can be narrowed by studying
the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
Dickens produced his serial novels mostly outside
the romance genre, but wrote them quickly under
extreme deadline pressures. Austen wrote her novels
at a leisurely pace, but her novels would fall squarely
into the romance genre.
Comparing contemporary literature to classic
novels has several advantages; the novels themselves
are familiar, the author’s lives are reasonably well
known and the works are unburdened by copyright.
They provide a control for the rather less well-
known Harlequin novels. Indeed, Austen is import-
ant for being one of the few romance writers we can
study directly using quantitative methods; some,
such as Georgette Heyer, are protected by copyright,
and others, such as Samuel Richardson, wrote in an
epistolary style. Dickens is a good control for a
writer under pressure because his life is so well
documented; records exist of not only original
manuscripts, printer’s receipts, and contracts but
even working notes (Butt and Tillotson, 1957).
Jane Austen’s novels all sit easily inside the ro-
mance genre and are direct progenitors of
Harlequin Presents (Regis, 2003, pp. 75–84). Her
working habits were unusual for many reasons,
but for these purposes, the most important is her
low rate of publication. Years would pass between a
novel’s first draft and publication. This time allowed
extensive revision between drafts, although the exact
methods remain ‘mostly guesswork’ (Tomalin,
1997, p. 154). If vocabulary decay is an intrinsic
328 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016
constraint of the romance genre, it should arise in
Austen’s writing.
Charles Dickens, on the other hand, was a pro-
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fessional writer operating under enormous time
pressures. His works were long narratives carved
out in a serial form. Each had to be readied for
the printer under considerable stress, and there is
evidence that he struggled with the deadlines when
working (Tomalin, 2011, p. 103). If vocabulary
decay is a product of either the conscious choices
of catering to a mass-market audience, or the result
of writer fatigue, vocabulary decay should be a fea-
ture of Dickens’ writing.
3.4 Jane Austen
Although Austen is not a contemporary author, her
novels meet the definition of romance given by
Regis. Certainly, the broad outlines of the novels
are similar; the stories are about heroines, their
struggles in love, and their final triumph in happi-
ness. Possibly the best reason for not placing these
classic novels within the romance genre is that the
classics are taken seriously, whereas romance novels
are not (Modleski, 1982, p. 1).
The inclusion of Austen as an author of ro-
mances is not a novel phenomenon—in fact, some
of the first studies of the category romance did so
explicitly (Modleski, 1982, p. 37), and it is now pre-
sented relatively uncritically (Pearce, 2004, p. 534).
Indeed, one of the most popular current subgenres
of the category romance are historical romances set
in Regency England that parallel Austen’s own
work. What none contest is that Austen’s pace of
writing was far from hasty and the composition of
her novels is masterly. If anywhere in the English
language uses precise control, it is here.
To test this assumption, the texts of all six com-
pleted Austen novels were taken from the Project
Gutenberg website. Their headers and footers con-
taining copyright and catalogue information were
stripped, and the words were allocated into seg-
ments using exactly the same method described
for the Harlequins. The entropy of each segment
was then calculated, in exactly the same way as the
Harlequin novels.
Fig. 3 shows the entropy of each segment across
all Jane Austen’s novels. There is no real pattern to
 Vocabulary decay in category romance

5.90

5.85

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5.80
entropy (nats)

5.75

5.70

5.65

5.60
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segment

Fig. 3 Sum of the Shannon Entropy of each segment across Austen’s novels. The data are not normally distributed, so
means and deviations are not shown

this distribution. Unlike the Harlequin novels ana-
lyzed above, Austen’s vary in length—from 76,917
in Northanger Abbey to 159,533 in Mansfield Park; a
variation of roughly 50%.
Intriguingly, it is the middle section as well as the
conclusion that has the greatest chance of contain-
ing unique words. There is no clear progression in
the enlargement or diminution of the Austen
novel’s vocabulary.
If the phenomenon of vocabulary decay was in-
trinsic to the romance novel, it should be here, in
Austen’s writing. Rather, it seems, some property of
Austen’s writing allowed her to avoid the symptoms.
In Austen, just as in contemporary romance, the
hero and heroine must be introduced and
sketched effectively. In both Austen and contempor-
ary romance, the hero and heroine must meet, fall
in love, not be together, and then, finally, live hap-
pily ever after. The narrative structure of Austen’s
novels is the same as a contemporary romance, but
they lack the progressive decline in unique
vocabulary.
3.5 Charles Dickens
If Austen wrote within the romance genre, but
wrote it at a steady, measured pace, Dickens wrote
well outside it, but produced a startling amount of
fiction on a tight schedule. His novels frequently
lack happy endings—a requirement for a romance
novel (Regis, 2003, p. 9)—and the narrative focus is
never mainly concerned with the betrothal of a
heroine. Much of the drama in Dickens comes
from not knowing what happens next, whereas the
pleasure of romance is typically thought of as an-
ticipation of the inevitable happy ending (Barlow
and Krentz, 1992, pp. 16–17).
Once again, novels were downloaded from the
Project Gutenberg website, segmented and the en-
tropy of each segment calculated across all novels.
The results can be seen in Fig. 4.
Unlike Austen, the progression of the writing in
Dickens shows a pattern: With the exception of the
final segment, Dicken’s vocabulary trends slightly
downwards throughout his novels. Two explan-
ations of the anomalous final segment present
themselves—pre-planning and post-editing (Butt
and Tillotson, 1957, pp. 13–34). While Dickens fre-
quently had no plan as to what would happen from
installment to installment, he always plotted the last
chapter well in advance. Similarly, Dickens would
often revisit the final chapter when republishing a
serial as a novel. In either case, the anomalous final
segment is unable to arrest the general trend of
Dickens’ vocabulary decay.

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016 329

J. Elliott

6.30

6.25

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6.20
entropy (nats)

6.15

6.10

6.05

6.00

5.95
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
segment

Fig. 4 Sum of the Shannon Entropy across the novels of Charles Dickens. Dotted line is fitted with Friedman’s
supersmoother. Data are not normally distributed, so means and deviations are not shown

4 Conclusion Charles Dickens, another writer under pressure,

The progression of a Harlequin novel is marked by
the steady shedding of unique words and recourse
to repeated chunks of text, particularly interpersonal
dialogue. While this lightens the cognitive load on
the writer, allowing them to quickly write a novel
with only limited sale value outside a single pub-
lisher, it also allows a reader to relax into the flow of
the narrative as the linguistic demands are progres-
sively reduced. Harlequin Presents may present an
extreme variation, but it is not a trivial one; this is
one of the most popular forms of fiction in the
world.
Vocabulary decay in the Harlequin Presents
novel highlights a shift from detailed specifics to-
wards generic romance as the novel progresses.
Words found only in the first segment (Table 1)
relate particularly to the high status of the hero,
allegedly the selling point of the Harlequin
Presents (Harlequin, 2012b), showing that this
element decreases in importance throughout the
novels. Common N-Grams used to coordinate dia-
logue between a masculine hero and feminine hero-
ine take the place of the aristocratically inflected
unique words (Table 2).
also shows signs of vocabulary decay in his serial
novels, suggesting that the phenomenon could be
due to the speed of composition. Austen’s novels
do not exhibit the pattern, making it clear that
this is not an intrinsic demand of the romance
novel more generally. Vocabulary is one of the
most fundamental aspects of writing style. This
study demonstrates that vocabulary can not only
vary throughout a novel, but does so in a predict-
able fashion across an entire genre. Machine analysis
usually relies on word counts to discover variation
between texts. When constructing these word
counts, care should be taken to account for the vari-
ation within texts, particularly when comparing
textual fragments. More strikingly, variation in vo-
cabulary could be used to develop new algorithms
that not only compensate for vocabulary decay, but
also quantify it as another element of style.
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Notes
1 Other, more exotic, definitions have been advanced in
the past (Makinen 2001), but no longer seem current.
Category romances are published as part of a category;
each category has a unique brand identity—romantic
suspense, supernatural, or medical romance etc. The
‘brand’ of the category is given more prominence
than the author or even the title. One reason for study-
ing category romance is the convenience of having the
object of study (the category) defined by the publisher.
2 Author pseudonyms in Harlequin Presents are more
about marketing than anonymity. Virtually, all authors
from the past 10 years maintain websites with their
various pseudonyms, publication history, and brief
biography. Only three authors in the history of
Harlequin Presents have been men (Elliott 2013).
3 Strength of effect is the Spearman correlation with the
mean trend.
331
J. Elliott
4 All tokens—words and punctuation—were extracted,
but this article uses the terms interchangeably.
5 The precise degree of similarity between category ro-
mance novels from the same category is an ongoing
research question. Some critics believe the genre to be
radically constrained (Rabine 1985, pp. 164–5), whereas
most critics understand the novels as a negotiation
332 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2016
between the constraints of the category and the author’s
creativity (Vivanco 2011, pp 21–2). Category identity
is strong enough, though, that it influences every-
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thing from the language in the novel to the
formatting of the manuscript (De Geest 2010,
pp 101–2).