AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTIONS OF DAN BROWN, A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Authorship attribution is a science of identifying the characteristics of the author from the text of the document he composed. The question of authorship is as old as the biblical books. Due to the advancement in technology, there are various ways to identify the writer's attributes in the text he/she produces. In this study, the authorship attribution of an American writer; Dan Brown has been investigated through the use of a specific discourse marker i.e. conjunctions. Corpus tools were used to tag and identify the conjunctions. The study not only focuses on the analysis of conjunctions but also the way the writer has used them to create coherence in his novels. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) model of cohesion was used while analyzing the data of the study. The results of the analysis show that the writer uses more additive conjunctions to maintain coherence in his writing. The study has strong research implications for the young linguists to find the authorship characteristics in the relevant texts of various authors.