Correlations and Potential Cross-Linguistic Indicators of Writing Style

In this paper, we present preliminary results on how an individual’s writing style persists even across languages. In other words, what aspects of an individual’s writing will persist irrespective of the language in which he or she writes? We argue that cognitive and social traits are likely to persist and demonstrate this by two separate analyses of bilingual corpora using the same individuals. We show that for various measures of linguistic complexity (which we consider to be a cognitive variable) and participation in specific social conventions (a social one), the correlation between scores on the two languages studied is significantly higher than would be expected by chance. We argue that this type of correlation may permit cross-linguistic authorship attribution.