The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [111]
These same language patterns appear for online chat rooms as well. Chat rooms for strangers trying to meet others use words like our stranger groups. People in chat rooms devoted to sports talk like real people at real sporting events. And chat rooms made up of people who know each other have conversations that use words similar to those among friends at dinner.
To get a sense of how different the language of these contexts is, imagine that we gave our computer hundreds of new transcripts from recordings across similar situations. How well could the computer categorize which language went with which situation? In this example, there are five different contexts or situations, meaning that a computer should correctly assign language samples to the right category 20 percent of the time by chance alone. Our computers do much better, averaging 84 percent correct.
Think about the logic of these findings. The situations we are in define the words we use. Imagine spending a weekend with your friends. If you go to a sporting event, you will use one set of words; you then go to a bar and you call forth a different group of words. All of a sudden, you find yourselves in a grocery store and yet another pattern of words is exchanged. The effects are so strong and predictable, one could even claim that the situations you are in demand that you talk in a certain way. OK, “demand” is a little strong. Nevertheless, where we are and what we are doing primes us to think and talk in highly specific ways.
On the surface, this may sound trivial. When playing or watching sports, people tend to talk about the game. When eating dinner with friends, most of us talk about shared friends or experiences from the past. Contexts or situations dictate the topics of conversation, which undoubtedly influence people’s use of stealth or function words. But there is more to it. Function words tell us the ways that groups and the people who inhabit them are paying attention to their worlds, relating to others, thinking, and feeling.
The word-catching studies also provide an interesting and almost upside-down way of thinking about stealth words. Most of this chapter and book has been devoted to showing how the words people use reflect who they are. These same words can also tell us where people are and what they are doing. Feed the transcript of a conversation into the right computer and it will tell you about the individuals in the conversation, their relationships, and their situation.
TRACKING THE GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION OF GROUPS
This is where things start to get a little creepy. If groups of people tend to talk and write in similar ways, it should be possible to estimate the physical location of the groups. This goes beyond estimating if someone is at the mall, in a park, or eating in a restaurant. By using both content and function words, it is possible to make educated guesses about which particular mall, park, or restaurant the speakers happen to be visiting.
The logic of linguistic tracking is similar to that of identifying accents. Depending on what country you live in, you probably do better than chance in picking out which region a speaker hails from. In the United States, the southern drawl, the midwestern twang, and the New York dialect can often be spotted within a few seconds by listeners. Computerized text analysis programs, of course, don’t analyze accents but instead focus on specific words or word patterns that may be common to different geographic regions.
Regional differences in the naming of things exist for a large array of foods, objects, and behaviors. If you want a soft drink in the Northeast, you will likely ask for a soda, in the South you will