Sketch of Research Statistical Analysis has long been employed
in the study of literary texts and has tended, for obvious
reasons to concentrate on the most common or the most uncommon
of the linguistic phenomena they display. The discovery, by
Burrows, on which much of our work rests is that the frequency-
patterns of all the most common words, whatever they may be, are
so distinctive, stable, and closely interlocked that they reveal
more when they are examined together than when any of them is
examined in isolation. After ten years work, we are able to form
useful inferences, at an extremely high level of probability,
from almost any comparative study of two or more sets of texts
and, upon that basis, to predict how further texts will behave.
Such comparisons may reflect change over time or differences of
literary form within the writings of a single author;
characteristic differences between two or more authors; and
larger "class-differences" between different groups of authors.
These last include consisten