The Secret Life of Pronouns

Pennebaker's subject is not what people say but the small words they use while saying it. His research applies computerised text analysis to very large quantities of ordinary language, letters, poems, books, blogs, posts and transcribed conversation, and looks at the function words that carry no content of their own: pronouns, articles, prepositions. His finding is that these are the revealing ones, precisely because nobody chooses them deliberately or remembers using them. The patterns he reports connect word use to status, honesty, depression, group membership and the state of a relationship, and his claim is that they can show things about a person that the person cannot report themselves, since the words are produced below the level of conscious editing. The obvious caution is that this is correlational work at scale, and the strength of any individual claim varies. It has been influential in psychology, linguistics and, less comfortably, in commercial and security applications.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

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• James Pennebaker