ʼn Korpusgebaseerde ondersoek na kohesiepatrone as moontlike stilistiese kenmerk van outeurstyl

Writers leave a trail behind when they write a text because individuals have preferences for certain linguistic items (Louwerse, 2004:307). In theory, this means that texts can be identified as the work of a specific author, based on his or her linguistic choices. The identification of an author as the producer of a certain text, is a part of the academic field of authorship attribution studies. Joula (2008:249-251) suggests that there are certain aspects within authorship attribution studies which remain uncertain. These aspects mainly relate to making the most appropriate decisions about methodology when conducting authorship attribution studies. Another aspect he (Joula, 2008:249-251) mentions relates to the choice of linguistic item to be studied as possible indication of authorship. Both the question about appropriate methodological considerations and that of an (linguistic) indication of authorship is explored in this study. This study mainly aims to investigate whether the use of cohesive devices in a text (or texts) can be an indication of authorship. It also attempts to describe the way(s) in which the use and distribution of cohesion links can be used as a basis in authorship attribution studies. The fives types of cohesive devices as described by, among others, Halliday and Hasan (1976) will be used as linguistic variables to show possible authorship. These categories include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions and lexical cohesion. As an additional aspect to the research, the way in which cohesion links appear in two texts types (and not just the texts of two different authors) is also described. A corpus-based methodology was followed to study the use of cohesive devices in the texts of two popular Afrikaans authors, André le Roux and Dana Snyman. The corpus for this study consisted of four sub-corpora, namely columns and short stories by Dana Snyman and columns and short stories by André le Roux. The data analysis process was made up of different stages, namely the tagging of cohesive linguistic items, sorting of the tags by means of computer software (WordSmith Tools), classifying the sorted tags to indicate the type of cohesion and statistically analysising of the use of cohesive devices. The above-mentioned statistical analysis consisted of multiple stages (just like the process of data analysis) with the goal of systematically and reliably identifying and delineating relevant data. In each stage a dataset was analysed by means of a specific statistical test to identify parts of the dataset which could be unique to the author or text type in question. Data that were identified as a result of the statistical analysis became the dataset for the subsequent stage of statistical analysis. This process is explained in the flow diagram at the beginning of Chapter 6. Through this process relevant data (as identified by statistical analysis) could be used for relevant statistical tests in order to optimize the process of statistical analysis and improve efficiency. After the literature review, data analysis and various stages of the analyses, the nature of cohesive devices as an element of language variation between the texts of the two authors mentioned is discussed. A reflection of the methodological and statistical approaches of this study forms part of the final chapter, together with a discussion of the implications of the findings and recommendations for future research.