In Kuya (1985), a computer-based quantitative analysis was made of rhyming words occurring in the corpus of ten Pre-Shakespearian plays (including Everyman, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurtons Nedle and so on), for which authorship has not been estabilshed due to lack of direct evidence. In order to determine the authorship of the works, distances, or what is called degrees of similarity, were measured in terms of mathematical figures. They were sum total of figures calculated item by item based on the identicalness of graphically defined word forms between respective dramatic works in pairs. The resultative matrices were further converted to figures with three coordinates through factor analysis.
Consequently, several groups have been formed, with some subdivisions. There seems to have been no great difference in authorship ratiocination between this computer-based survey and traditional studies except that the computer attributes authorship of one dramatic work, Respublica. to an unknown author other than N. Udall.
This paper attempts to discover the factors which have made such grouping possible. In other words, this is a qualitative review of the conclusion reached by the computer-oriented quantitative survey. Special consideration has been given to: (i. a) the paradigmatic relationship between rhyme words and the very same words occurring in a non-rhyming position; between rhyme words and their rhyming counterparts (i.e. rhyme fellows). These kinds of lexical networks in a particular context will give a clue as to the wholelinguistic source and structure available to respective authors.
(i.b) differences in the distributive pattern of variants: e.g. words with vowel variants like harte/hearte/ herte, words with or without a final-e like go/goes and so forth.
(ii)syntagmatic relationship: syntactic behaviour of verbs (including auxiliaries) and nouns.
It is concluded, (i) that variants have an important role to play in authorship attribution; (ii) that combinatory inquiry into paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships of particular lexical items has shed a light on the lexical similarity in some specific cases. This latter point may lead us to a possibility that Respublica is not so far from R.R. Doister as any other work frequently attributed to N. Udall is. But the amount of observable evidence, on the whole, seems rather small due to a few case studies shown here.
Further research along these lines can make a small contribution to authorship attribution.

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The aim of this paper is to examine pro with respect to the absence of that-t effects in Old English (OE). We suggest that only nonargument pro exists in OE (except in its earliest stage (cf. Pintzuk&Kroch,1985)).
The that-t effects are superficially absent in syntactic long movement in OE as well as in Italian, Hebrew, etc. This fact can be accounted for in terms of movement from a VP-internal position, as proposed by Rizzi (1982), provided that we revise the pro module assumed there along the lines pursued in Rizzi(1986).
Casting this account in the recent framework of base-generating the external argument within V-projection, we may conclude that sentences in OE optionally have the specifier position of INFL.
Finally, we present some evidence that INFL precedes VP in OE, allowing for V2 in embedded Clauses with complementizers. This ties in nicely with our account of absence of the that-t effect in OE.

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The present participle of OE (Old English) is different from that of PE(Present-Day English) in its syntactic behaviours as well as in its morphological form. In the noun-modifying constructions, -ende participles cannot take any object. That is, there is no “transitive” present participle functioning as noun-modifier whether prenominally or postnominally. Thus there were no counterparts to (1) and (2), which are both allowed in PE.
(i) a [chill] air [surrounding those who are down in the world]
(ii) an attracting gesture (= a gesture which attracts someone)
The question is how the lack of transitive -ende participle in the noun-modifying constructions should be explained.
We will propose that the affix -ing in PE inherits the θ-grid of the stem verb while the affix -ende in OE does not. We also assume that the inherited θ-grid percolates to the-ing participle. Then the lack of the transitive construction of noun-modifying-ende will be attributed to the θ-criterion, which prohibits unassigned θ-roles of the θ-grid.

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