The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us

In this intriguing treatise on computational linguistics, Pennebaker (Writing to Heal), chair of psychology at the University of Texas%E2%80%93Austin, probes innocuous "function words"%E2%80%94such as pronouns, prepositions, and articles%E2%80%94for clues to hidden states of mind. Deploying computer analyses of word-use frequency, he conducts an exercise in psychological and demographic profiling by means of verbal tell-tales: people who overuse articles, nouns, prepositions, and the word "we," for example, tend to be old, male, high-status, and cheerful, while people who overuse pronouns, verbs, and the word "I" tend to be young, female, low-status, and depressed. Pennebaker's accessible, entertaining account dissects a riotous assortment of language samples, from presidential speeches and Shakespeare to Beatles songs and Lady Gaga tweets, expounding on everything from the self-absorbed "language of suicidal poets" to the circumlocutions of liars. He's not always trenchant%E2%80%94Osama bin Laden's rhetoric betrayed a "need for power," he reveals%E2%80%94and he's sometimes overly reductionist; he speculates that poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "tend[ency] to use function words similarly... may explain why the two were so attracted to one another," and then graphs their relationship. Still, Pennebaker's take on the unexpected importance of throw-away words is the kind of fun pop linguistics readers devour. B&w illus. (Aug.)