This study investigates linguistic coordination in fictional dialogue, examining whether the phenomenon typically observed in natural conversation also appears in imagined exchanges created by authors. We analyse dialogues from ten English novels by Jane Austen and E. M. Forster using the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus (PDNC) to measure linguistic convergence across nine function word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) lexicon, complemented by network based measures that capture how linguistic adaptation shapes interactions among characters. The results provide evidence of convergence in both authors, confirming that linguistic coordination extends to literary dialogue. The network analysis supports these findings, revealing that alignment is generally reciprocal, unevenly distributed but widespread, and often crosses social and narrative boundaries. Taken together, these results suggest that linguistic coordination in fiction does not depend on deliberate stylistic planning, but reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in language processing and social interaction.

Authorship verification aims to assess whether a questioned text is stylistically compatible with an author’s known writings, a task that is particularly challenging in historical corpora with partial ground truth. We address this problem in the context of Mihai Eminescu’s journalistic corpus, a historically grounded collection comprising published articles, manuscripts, and texts of uncertain authorship. Using a profile-based framework with character n-grams and function words, we examine how stylistic compatibility behaves across different profile construction settings and temporal splits. The results show that character trigram profiles consistently accept verified texts while producing a small and stable set of rejections among disputed items, whereas function word profiles show near complete acceptance across the corpus. A qualitative analysis shows that rejected texts exhibit meaningful differences in discourse structure and communicative purpose. These findings illustrate how authorship verification can support literary scholarship through stable signals for close reading.