The Secret Life of Pronouns. What Our Words Say About Us

Abstract

This is a great book that aims to popularize the study of how function words such as pronouns, but also articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, reveal personality traits and roles within relationships. James Pennebaker is a social psychologist who has made major contributions in understanding how people who have gone through traumatic experiences may be helped by writing about them. He has also invested a good deal of time in developing techniques for counting function words and interpreting differences in their distributions. And while Pennebaker focuses on interpreting differences in distributions as reflections of different personality types or different roles in relations, he is interested in a wide range of other topics in which the interpretation of the word frequencies might play a role, including psychological health, emotions, honesty vs. deception, corporate and regional identity, literature, authorship attribution, authority in relationships, and political appeal. The book deserves a review in LLC because it pays attention to linguistic and literary interests, and especially because it adds an interpretive dimension to stylometry (the study of style using exact techniques), which has been underdeveloped to-date (but see, too, Noecker et al., 2013). As readers of this journal know, stylometry has come to focus increasingly on authorship attribution as an objective validation of its work, and has come to accept—with some demurring voices (Burrows, 2007)—that function word distributions are the most interesting indicators of authorship. I will criticize Pennebaker a bit later in the text for largely ignoring the stylometric literature, but I will focus on what he does contribute, and that is a great deal. The focused contribution Pennebaker is making concerns the interpretation of stylometric results—e.g. what does it mean if we find that an author uses an unusual number of first person singular pronouns (I-words)? His results are often surprising.