Summary of the Study This study attempts to identify the distinct stylistic features of the three contemporary Tamil scholars named Mahakavi Barathi (MB), V. Kalsanasundaram (VK) and Subramaniya Iyer (SI) by using their literary works. These three scholars wrote articles on India's Freedom Movement in the magazine called India. Initially, all the three scholars have written articles by attributing their names however, because of the oppressive attitude of the then British Regime, all the three writers wrote articles on the same topic anonymously in the same magazine. All the attributed and unattributed articles written on India’s Freedom Movement in that magazine were compiled and brought out as a book entitled Bharathi Dharisanam in the year 1975. All attributed articles of these three scholars written on India’s
Freedom Movement in the year 1906 are considered for this quantitative stylistic study. The researchers, Mappillairaju Bagavandas and G. Manimannan, based their study on the nineteen articles of Bharati, six articles of Kalyanasundram and seven articles of Subramaniya Iyer. For this study, the researches considered eighteen stylistic features. They include eleven morphological variables, four habitual words and three function words. The frequency counts of the stylistic features must be normalized to the text length in an article for this study. Each sentence is considered as a sample, therefore ,to normalize the stylistic features, the raw frequency counts of each stylistic feature is divided by the number of words in each sentence and the multiplied by hundred to express it in percentage. The eighteen stylistic features which are identified from each sentence include parts of speech, habitual words and function words. Both voices and tenses are expressed in frequencies but not in percentages.
The data matrix of size is n (sentences) x p (stylistic features from each sentence).