Syntactical Motifs and Textual Structures: Considerations based on the Study of a Latin historical Corpus

Abstract: A method initially developed to carry out automatic comparisons and classifications of Latin historians texts shows that some well-ordered and characteristic structures, – some syntactical motifs in particular –, can perfectly distinguish a text from the others texts making up the corpus. This paper will establish on which factors the relevance of such a reduction method can be grounded in order to give an account of affinities and distances between texts: recurrence of the chosen motifs, exhaustiveness of the counting, respect of the text linearity both on the local level and on the global level. This will lead to a reflection on the notions of texture and textuality, understood through the properties of linearity and reticularity.