The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the network theory through an application of quantitative studies of text styles. We build a network from sentences of a text and the relative positions of the words in the sentence. The sentences are used as vertices of the network and connections were established between the vertices each time the same word appeared in the same position in the sentence. We compare here, texts of Brazilian authors Machado de Assis and Rui Barbosa and articles of a local newspaper, Tribuna do Norte. We estimate the dispersion, D, of the curve of number of connections of the network vertices which is characterized by presenting strong discontinuities. The quantity D is used to characterize the stylistic richness of the text.
networks; stylometry; linguistics
