Researchers found that James Joyce achieved a perfectly symmetrical distribution between short and long sentences.
From the diary: Chaos
WASHINGTON, August 20, 2024 – Statistical analyses of classic literature have shown that the way punctuation structures a text follows certain universal mathematical relationships. But James Joyce’s work Finnegans Wake famously breaks the rules of normal prose with its unusual, dreamlike stream of consciousness. A new paper on chaos theory, published in AIP Publishing’s journal Chaos, takes a closer look at how Joyce’s sophisticated novel excels mathematically.
Researchers compared the distribution of punctuation in various experimental novels to determine the underlying order of Finnegans Wake. Through statistical analysis of the texts, Stanisz et al. found that the tome has an unusual but statistically identifiable structure.
“‘Finnegans Wake’ is a narrative style that allows longer sequences of words to continue without punctuation marks,” said author Stanisław Drożdż. “This could indicate that this type of storytelling is less stressful on the human perceptual and respiratory systems or, in other words, that it resonates better with them.”
The longer the sequence of words without punctuation, the higher the probability that a punctuation mark will appear next. Such a relationship is called a Weibull distribution. Weibull distributions apply to everything from human diseases to The Gates of Paradise, a Polish novel written almost entirely in a single sentence of nearly 40,000 words.
Enter Finnegans Wake, which weaves together puns, idioms and portmanteaus from up to 70 languages into a dreamlike stream of consciousness. Typical of Joyce’s later works, the book contains some of the only known examples that appear not to conform to the Weibull distribution of punctuation.
The team analyzed 10 experimental novels based on the number of words between punctuation marks. These sets of numbers were combined for each book to form a singularity spectrum, which describes how ordered sentences of different lengths are proportioned. Finnegans Wake has a notoriously wide range of sentence lengths, which gives a broad spectrum.
While most punctuation distributions tend toward shorter word sequences, the broad singularity spectrum in Finnegans Wake was perfectly symmetrical, meaning that the variability in sentence length follows an ordered curve.
This degree of symmetry is a rare feat in the real world and implies a well-organized, complex hierarchical structure that is perfectly consistent with a phenomenon known as multifractality, which are systems represented by fractals within fractals.
“‘Finnegans Wake’ seems to have the unique property that the probability of interrupting a sequence of words with a punctuation mark decreases with the length of the sequence,” Drożdż said. “This makes the narrative more flexible to create perfect, widely correlated cascade patterns that better reflect the way nature works.”
Drożdż hopes the work will help large language models better capture long-term correlations in text. Next, the team hopes to apply its work in this area.
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Article title
Statistics of punctuation in experimental literature – the remarkable case of “Finnegans Wake” by James Joyce
Authors
Tomasz Stanisz, Stanisław Drożdż, Jaroslaw Kwapien
Author affiliations
Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow University of Technology
