Abstract
Abstract To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire–Revised (S. Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985). This method allowed us to isolate linguistic features associated with different personality types, via both word and part-of-speech n-gram analysis. We investigated the extent to which extraversion is associated with linguistic features involving positivity, sociability, complexity, and implicitness and neuroticism is associated with negativity, self-concern, emphasis, and implicitness. Numerous interesting features were uncovered. For instance, higher levels of extraversion involved a preference for adjectives, whereas lower levels of neuroticism involved a preference for adverbs. However, neither positivity nor negativity was as prominent as expected, and there was little evidence for implicitness.
Keywords
Character (mathematics)Computer scienceComputer-mediated communicationSpeech communicationLinguisticsCorpus linguisticsPsychologyNatural language processingThe InternetMathematicsWorld Wide Web
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Publication Info
- Year
- 2006
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 239-270
- Citations
- 134
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
Jon Oberlander,
Alastair J. Gill
(2006).
Language With Character: A Stratified Corpus Comparison of Individual Differences in E-Mail Communication.
Discourse Processes
, 42
(3)
, 239-270.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326950dp4203_1
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1207/s15326950dp4203_1