Patterns of Wisdom: Discourse-Level Style in Multi-Sentence Quotations

Abstract

Quotations are kernels not just of wisdom but also of beautiful and striking language. While recent studies have characterized the stylistic features of quotations, we characterize the order of stylistic information within quotations. Analyzing a corpus of two-sentence quotations collected from the social network Tum-blr, we explore the ways that both low-level features and high-level features tend to occur in either the first or second sentence. Through analysis of examples, we interpret these ten-dencies as manifestations of rhetorical patterns. Results from a prediction task suggest that stylistic patterns are more prominent in quotations than in a comparison corpus.