Style Consistency and Authorship Attribution: A Statistical Investigation*

This study makes an attempt to use multivariate statistical technique, specifically, canonical discriminant analysis, to establish authorial consistency in the writing styles of three scholars of Tamil language using their own articles and to attribute authorship to disputed articles written in the same period and in the same magazine. Thirty-two attributed and 23 disputed articles written on India's freedom in the year 1906 are considered for this statistical investigation. The stylistic features of this study are 24 commonly occurring function words.