Few novelists today would have a character say, 鈥淚t is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.鈥� That is not only because few modern characters ponder death by guillotine, but also because writing styles have changed dramatically since Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. So how does literary style evolve? Surprisingly, clues lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as 鈥渢o鈥� and 鈥渢hat鈥�.
By analysing how writers use such 鈥渃ontent-free鈥� words, mathematician and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, were able to conduct the .
Content-free words are indicative of writing style, Rockmore says. While two authors might use the same words to describe a similar event, they will use content-free 鈥渟yntactic glue鈥� to link their words in a different way.
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Using the digital library, Rockmore鈥檚 team analysed 7733 English language works written since 1550, tracking how often and in what context content-free words appeared. As you might expect, they found that writers were strongly influenced by their predecessors.
They also found that as the canon of literature grew, the reach of older works shrank. Authors in the earliest periods wrote in a very similar way to one another, the researchers found, probably because they all read the same small body of literature. But approaching the modern era, when more people were writing and more works were available from many eras and numerous styles, authors鈥� styles were still very similar to those of their immediate contemporaries. 鈥淚t鈥檚 as if they find dialects in time,鈥� says of the University of Bristol, UK, who was not involved in the study. 鈥淐ontent is what makes us distinctive, but content-free words put us in different groups.鈥�
That writers should be most influenced by their contemporaries rather than the great works of the past is interesting, Rockmore says, because it challenges the reach of 鈥渃lassic鈥� literature. When it comes to style at least, perhaps we aren鈥檛 so strongly influenced by the classics after all.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1115407109
