Unravelling the Purple Thread: Function Word Variability and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae
E. K. TSE, Fiona J. Tweedie, Bernard Frischer · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 1998
Recent work by Meissner, and Tse and Frischer examines the variability of function words within the Scriptores Historiae Augustae (SHA) and other texts by Latin authors. In this paper, we correct the methodological flaws, both statistical and textual, of these works. We examine the variability of function words using van Valen's test for equality of variances of several samples and find no evidence for the presence of a ‘purple thread’ of single authorship through the texts of the SHA.