Read the following two passages regarding the methodology of authorship attribution in literature.
Passage A
The attribution of disputed Early Modern texts cannot rely solely on internal textual mechanics, divorced from the material and historical realities of theatrical production. Traditional philology has long recognized that an author's style is not a static monolith; rather, it is highly malleable, consciously adapted to suit specific genres, acting companies, and target audiences. To assume that a playwright commissioned to write a formal court masque would employ the same vocabulary, rhetorical devices, and syntactic structures as when writing a bawdy city comedy is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of collaborative Renaissance authorship and professional playwriting. During this era, playwrights were working craftsmen who tailored their output to the immediate demands of the stage and the shifting tastes of the public. Consequently, any attempt to define an author's 'true' voice or establish a definitive textual baseline must prioritize external historical evidence—such as stationers' registers, contemporary diaries, theatrical accounts, and censorship records—over myopic textual analysis. Internal textual evidence is inherently unstable, precisely because it fails to account for the deliberate, context-driven stylistic shifts required by different theatrical environments. When historical documentation is absent, scholars must resist the temptation to invent a mathematical substitute for missing historical facts, acknowledging instead that some attribution questions may remain permanently unresolvable.
Passage B
In recent decades, advances in computational stylometry have revolutionized the field of authorship attribution by shifting the focus away from subjective historical speculation toward empirical, quantifiable data. By analyzing the frequency and distribution of 'function words'—the unconscious, structural elements of language such as prepositions, conjunctions, and articles—scholars can now identify a unique, unalterable syntactic fingerprint for any given author. Unlike thematic content, rhetorical flourishes, or conscious vocabulary choices, which authors may intentionally manipulate to suit a particular genre or audience, the baseline rate at which an author uses words like 'and', 'but', 'by', or 'if' remains remarkably consistent across their entire corpus. This statistical stability operates below the level of conscious authorial control, rendering it impervious to the stylistic adaptations required by different literary forms. Consequently, this methodology allows stylometrists to accurately assign authorship even when external historical evidence is contradictory, ambiguous, or entirely absent. By relying on the mathematical bedrock of unconscious syntactic habits, computational stylometry provides a rigorous, objective foundation for literary taxonomy that traditional historical methods simply cannot match. The algorithms used in these analyses have been tested against works of known authorship across various historical periods, consistently demonstrating that an author's usage rate of function words is as distinct and unchanging as a biometric signature, regardless of whether they are writing a tragedy, a treatise, or a personal letter.
Based on the principles outlined in Passage A, which of the following best describes how Author A would most likely react to Author B's claim that the frequency of function words provides an 'unalterable syntactic fingerprint' across an author's entire corpus?
- Skepticism, on the grounds that a playwright's syntactic structures are consciously adapted to suit the distinct demands of different dramatic genres.Answer
- BAgreement, because both authors recognize that identifying an author's true voice requires isolating those elements of style that remain unaffected by the expectations of the target audience.
- CDisagreement, pointing out that because Renaissance plays were highly collaborative, the function words in any given text represent an unanalyzable composite of multiple writers rather than a single author.
- DRejection, asserting that any attempt to analyze an author's syntactic structures must be derived primarily from stationers' registers and contemporary diaries.
- EDismissal, claiming that textual analysis of any kind is entirely irrelevant to authorship attribution when compared to the material and historical realities of theatrical production.