Thanks, Clive and Wiley, for this interesting thread. Stylometrics is a very old part of classics, used to argue authorship, date, and so on. An interesting thing about the field is that early results are often wrong!
I have always told my students that great writers, like Shakespeare, generally write in a ratio of at least 2 to 1, noun to adjective or verb to adverb. Perhaps I was understating the ratio. I don't remember offhand where I first read about this, but I do know that my own informal counting seemed to be consistent with this result for Shakespeare.
I don't totally agree with you, Wiley, on the importance of the placement of a modifier, since I don't think that we process individual words, typically. With highly inflected languages, like Latin and Greek, there is no doubt that language gets processed in bigger chunks than in languages with fairly rigid word order, but even in English there is "chunking".
In conversations like this I think we are missing a subject of great importance if we neglect the way in which adjectival and adverbial phrases and clauses figure in the economy of an utterance. A poem can muffle its essential statement in vast folds of adjectival and adverbial clauses without exceeding a desirable ratio of adjectives to nouns. Unless purposive, this can undermine a statement, and is often invisible to writers who don't think in these terms.
Tony
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