Analyzing Hemingway's Evolving Literary Style

other writers. He adds that the later novels seem more “mannered” and have less “impact” (p. 3). Comley and Scholes (1998) suggest that literary critics agreed that Hemingway’s style has undergone several changes. Cowley (1962, p. 46) argues that “by the early 1930’s Hemingway’s technique, apparently simple in the beginning, was becoming more elaborate”. Epstein (1982, p. 557) agrees that Hemingway was reduced to having produced only one good novel The Sun also Rises, some good short stories, and “the originator of once elegantly simple prose style that over the years dried up and flaked off in self-parody”. While Assadnassab (2005, p. 19) maintains that Hemingway uses “long plain words”, other critics such as Young (1966, p. 203) claim that Hemingway prefers to use short words. As for Waldhorn (1972), he suggested that Hemingway’s style did not change significantly over the years. Wheeler (1998) suggests that Hemingway’s style has specific traits that set him apart. Thus, while some critics (Comley & Scholes, 1998; Paul, 1999) assert that Hemingway’s style changed

This is because “elaborate” and “terse” are effectively contrasting extremes on the same scale. In other words, the higher rates these features score in a corpus, the more elaborate it is considered to be and the less they score, the less elaborate it is considered to be. For instance, when measuring sentence complexity through counting the frequency of coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions, if we obtain less subordinating conjunctions than coordinating conjunctions, then the sentences are not complex. If, on the contrary, there are more subordinating conjunctions, then sentences are elaborate. The same thing can be applied to the other features such as word length, type/token ratio8, frequency of verbs, nouns, adjectives,