A Basis for a Formalization of Linguistic Style

I N T R O D U C T I O N Style in language is more than just surface appeaxance, on the contrary, it is an essential part of the meaning conveyed by the writer. A computational theory of style could be of great use in many computational linguistics applications. A system that is 'stylistically aware' could analyze the writer's stylistic intent and understand the complex interaction of choices that produce a certain effect. In applications such as machine translation, a computational theory of stylistics would allow the preservation or modification of stylistic effects across languages. The theory would also be useful in computer-aided language instruction where, along with vocabulary and grammar, the individual writing style of the student could be analysed and amended. The work described in this paper will be incorporated into into the Nigel grammar of the Penman system to provide a fine degree of stylistic control in language generation.