The rest of the story: Finding meaning in stylistic variation

The computational analysis of the style of natural language texts, computational stylistics, seeks to develop automated methods to (1) effectively distinguish texts with one stylistic character from those of another, and (2) give a meaningful representation of the differences between textual styles. Such methods have many potential applications in areas including criminal and national security forensics, customer relations management, spam/scam filtering, and scholarly research. In this chapter, we propose a framework for research in computational stylistics, based on a functional model of the communicative act. We illustrate the utility of this framework via several case studies.