Person vs. situation: Explorations of individual language use across discourse types and personality traits

Abstract

Authorship analysis studies tend to rely on the concept of idiolect, and on the assumptions that individual language use is consistent enough across situations, and distinctive enough to differentiate it from other individuals. Despite the acknowledged difficulty of authorship analysis across situations (e.g., genres or modes of production), such scenarios are scarcely researched. This lack of research, however, has considerable implications for forensic casework. Furthermore, the concept of personality is often ignored in linguistic research, and most studies on the relationship between language and personality are rarely linguistically informed and tend to employ approaches which produce misleading generalizations that can lead to misuse in profiling. This work, based on three empirical studies, addresses these gaps and takes a mixed-method approach to examining the nature of individual differences in language use across situations, and the links between language use and personality. Study 1, focused on linguistic distinctiveness and stability, offers novel conceptualizations and compares possible measures of the phenomena. Study 2 explores the associations between these phenomena and personality traits through statistical analyses. Finally, Study 3 offers a context-sensitive and linguistically informed approach to exploring personality differences projected through language use, combining keyness analysis with qualitative linguistic analyses involving corpus linguistic tools. Overall, this work demonstrates that there is a great range of variation in the distinctiveness and stability of individual language use across situations even in a relatively small and homogenous sample of individuals, and offers an exploratory typology of potentially individuating language patterns. Further, it identifies four personality traits which have stronger associations with individual stability and distinctiveness and highlights how these associations can be obscured by other intervening factors. Finally, through examining language patterns across those traits further, this work identifies personality differences projected through language and suggests language patterns that are more likely to display those differences.