The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [141]
270–271 Another way to think about language use is to listen to how presidents create stories about themselves. Dan McAdams has spent much of his career analyzing the stories people tell to get a better sense of their personality. His most recent work is a fascinating analysis of George W. Bush.
272 Perhaps the best source for presidential documents is through the American Presidency Project, directed by Gerhard Peters at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Peters and his collaborators are bringing together one of the largest archives of presidential documents, including speeches, interviews, press conferences, and much more. For more information, go to www.presidency.ucsb.edu/.
273 The figure is based on summing the standardized scores (z-scores) for personal pronouns and total emotion word use. To make all the numbers positive values, a constant of 3.0 was added to the resultant z-scores.
274 Although Franklin Roosevelt’s press conferences have been transcribed, they have also been heavily edited. FDR had arrangements with press members so that large blocks would be off the record. In terms of social-emotional language, his was the lowest of any modern president. However, because his language records are so heavily edited, they have not been included in the press conference corpus.
275 Bosch quote from the 2000 program notes of the PBS documentary series Reagan. www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reagan/filmmore/description.html
275–277 The Obama missing-I case was originally reported on Mark Liberman’s blog, the Language Log, at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1651. The I-word press conference data includes thirty-five press conferences or meetings of Obama from his inauguration in January 2009 through May 2010. Note that Mark Liberman, the founder of the Language Log blog, reported comparable findings in his analysis of Obama’s speeches.
276 The quotations about Obama’s use of I-words were written by George Will in the Washington Post, June 7, 2009, and by Stanley Fish in the New York Times, June 7, 2009.
281 An increasing number of researchers are trying to determine if it is possible to predict terrorism, extremism, and violent behavior through language analysis. Allison Smith, who now works for the Department of Homeland Security, has analyzed both violent and nonviolent extremist groups around the world and found that the ways they express themselves are quite different. For example, those groups that make the most references to in-group affiliations and power or dominance are the ones most likely to engage in violent behaviors.
283 On the southeast tip of Australia is Tasmania, an Australian island the size of England. One of Tasmania’s first and, arguably, most famous explorers was Henry Hellyer. To read an interesting account of how and why he died, see a recent analysis of his letters and journals by Jenna Baddeley, Gwyneth R. Daniel, and me.
284–287 The research on the admissions essays comes with several caveats. In general, traditional academic markers such as college board scores and high school rank are correlated with college grades at levels higher than our language measures (multiple Rs for traditional measures = .435; for language alone = .233; for both = .455, based on an N of 23,794).
APPENDIX: A HANDY GUIDE FOR SPOTTING AND INTERPRETING FUNCTION WORDS IN THE WILD
292 I’m indebted to Claude M. Chemtob for providing a large number of transcripts from people suffering from PTSD.
Footnote
* This is the only footnote you will see in this book. For more background on specific topics, check the notes section at the back of the book. A reference section is also included. Online exercises can be found at www.SecretLifeOfPronouns.com.
Bibliography and References
Adair, D. (1944). The authorship of the disputed Federalist