Predictability as related to style

2 June 1973

journal article
research article
Published by Taylor & Francis in Speech Monographs

Vol. 40 (2) , 101-112
https://doi.org/10.1080/03637757309375785

Abstract

Randomly chosen brief samples of language from the manuscripts of speeches by Rufus Choate, his contemporaries, and our contemporaries are compared. The principal tool is a generously modified version of Shannon's letter‐prediction procedure. The modification becomes a language‐prediction procedure in which university students, singly, guess successive words and are corrected with successive letters. The generating process is treated as tracking a sequence of prose and likened to a listener's role in “communication in process.” Choate's phrases were less predictable than the others, suggesting a greater surprise‐element for the listener. This quality, in turn, has been lauded by rhetoricians as a desirable property of style.

Keywords

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