Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives
This provides a systematic method for analyzing personal narratives to link linguistic choices to psychological states, which is incremental as it integrates existing domains.
The authors tackled the problem of lacking a formal framework for analyzing stylistic choices in personal narratives by developing a novel approach that formalizes style as linguistic patterns, applying it to hundreds of dream narratives and uncovering distinctive patterns in a war veteran's narratives, such as verbal processes dominating mental ones.
Personal narratives are stories authors construct to make meaning of their experiences. Style, the distinctive way authors use language to express themselves, is fundamental to how these narratives convey subjective experiences. Yet there is a lack of a formal framework for systematically analyzing these stylistic choices. We present a novel approach that formalizes style in personal narratives as patterns in the linguistic choices authors make when communicating subjective experiences. Our framework integrates three domains: functional linguistics establishes language as a system of meaningful choices, computer science provides methods for automatically extracting and analyzing sequential patterns, and these patterns are linked to psychological observations. Using language models, we automatically extract linguistic features such as processes, participants, and circumstances. We apply our framework to hundreds of dream narratives, including a case study on a war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder. Analysis of his narratives uncovers distinctive patterns, particularly how verbal processes dominate over mental ones, illustrating the relationship between linguistic choices and psychological states.