Attribution

Attribution is the establishment of a work's authorship, as well as the time and place of its creation and other essential features, when this information is unknown, doubtful, or disputed. Attribution is an important task of textology, bibliology, and source studies. To establish the authorship of anonymous or pseudonymous works, a combination of methods is applied: the analysis of style and language (stylometry, idiostyle), of ideational-thematic features, of historical-biographical and archival evidence, and, today, computer methods of attribution by the statistical parameters of a text. One distinguishes attribution (the ascription of authorship) from de-attribution (the refutation of a wrongly ascribed authorship). Attribution problems accompany many monuments of early literature; a classic example is the debates over the authorship and authenticity of 'The Tale of Ihor's Campaign.' The attribution of works wrongly excluded from collections or ascribed to other authors is also a task of the textology of modern Ukrainian literature.