Time Evolution of Writing Styles in Romanian Language

Abstract

This paper presents a diachronic analysis centered on the exploration of differences between the writing styles of journalistic texts in Romanian language. This analysis is focused on the time evolution of this language across two adjacent regions, Bessarabia and Romania in two major periods that were marked by important historical differences. Our aim is to examine these language differences based on corpora of historical and contemporary texts. To this end, we employ the ReaderBench framework to calculate a number of textual complexity indices that can be reliably used to characterize writing style. These analyses are conducted on two independent corpora for each of the two language styles, covering the following time periods: 1941-1991, when Bessarabia was separated from Romania and became a state in the Soviet Union (and there were few connections and language influences with Romania), and after July 1991, when Bessarabia became an independent state, Republic of Moldavia (and many language interactions with Romania occurred). The results of our analyses highlight the lexical and cohesive textual complexity indices that best reflect the differences in writing style, ranging from sentence and paragraph structure to word entropy and cohesion, measured in terms of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).