单选题 How does literary style evolve? Surprisingly, 41 lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as "to" and "that".
By analysing 42 writers use such "content-free" words, Daniel Rockmore and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover were able to conduct the first, large-scale style analysis of literature.
Content-free words are 43 of writing style, Rockmore says. While two authors might use the 44 content words to describe a similar event, they will use content-free words to 45 their content words in a different way.
Using the Project Gutenberg digital library, Rockmore"s team analysed 7733 English language works written since 1550, 46 how often and in what 47 content-free words appeared. As you might expect, they found that writers were 48 influenced by their predecessors.
They also found that as the number of literature works grew, the influence of older works 49 . Authors in the 50 periods wrote in a very similar way to one another, the researchers found, probably because they all read the same 51 body of literature. But approaching the modern era, 52 more people were writing and more works were 53 from many eras and numerous styles, authors" styles were still very similar to those of their 54 contemporaries. "It"s as if they find dialects in time," says Alex Bentley. "Content is what makes us 55 , but content-free words put us in different 56 ."
57 writers should be most influenced by their contemporaries 58 the great works of the past is interesting, Rockmore says, because it challenges the 59 of "classic" literature. When it comes to style 60 , perhaps we aren"t so strongly influenced by the classics after all.