https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/cognitive_philology <p>"The point is not the text, but the mind that made it". Cognitive philology is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that aims to foster communication between literary, textual, philological disciplines on the one hand and researches across the whole range of the cognitive, evolutionary, ecological and human sciences on the other.</p> Dipartimento di Studi europei americani e interculturali en-US Cognitive philology 2035-391X https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/cognitive_philology/article/view/19202 <p>The paper conducts a replication study on a case of authorship attribution, confirming the influence of genre on stylometric analyses. In particular, it focuses on the impact of the pornographic genre on the usage of function words, which are the key feature for the Delta method. Case study is <em>Josephine Mutzenbacher</em>, a pornographic novel published anonymously in Austria in 1906 and initially attributed to Felix Salten. A recent paper, however, adopted the Delta method to attribute it to Ernst Klein. Our replication shows how this result depends mainly on the choice of including in the analysis also pornographic novels by Klein, which drive the attribution thanks to their over-usage of first-person pronouns.</p> Simone Rebora Massimo Salgaro Copyright (c) 2026 Cognitive philology 2026-03-02 2026-03-02 18 https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa03/cognitive_philology/article/view/19216 <p>This article focuses, from a multidisciplinary perspective, on an ad hoc corpus of medieval Italian literature defined by geographical (Tuscany) and chronological criteria (13th and 14th centuries). The goals are both methodological and operational: first, we discuss the contribution of computational linguistics techniques in attributive philology; second, we use a philological approach combined with some newer artificial-intelligence (AI) approaches to promote or reconsider a variety of proposals of attribution for unknown texts selected as part of Antonio Pucci’s corpus of disputed authorship. It was considered interesting to also include in such corpus some representative texts in Dante studies, such as the <em>Fiore</em>, the <em>Detto d’Amore</em> and the sonnet <em>Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne</em> – whose authorship, still in doubt, is disputed with Pucci – without any pretense of providing a solution, but with the purpose of both testing the reliability of these methods in identifying the most probable candidate authors and adding new elements to the debate over these case studies.</p> Francesca Cupelloni Aris Anagnostopoulos Copyright (c) 2026 Cognitive philology 2026-03-03 2026-03-03 18