Source: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Our ability to use language involves a combination of complex mechanisms that allow us to produce speech, learn words, and combine those words into sentences. We certainly notice the oddities in people’s speech when they are not a native speaker of your language. But, a lot of what you say daily involves habits you have developed over the course of your life.

Some of the habits you develop are part of the dialect that is spoken by the people around you. For example, the fizzy beverage you get at restaurants was called soda in my native New Jersey, but tonic in Boston and pop in the Midwest. Some of the habits you develop are more specific to you as an individual. For example, when somebody points something out to me, I have a tendency to respond with phrases like “Apparently…” and “So it appears,” that are idiosyncratic.

Linguists and psychologists have delved into many of the kinds of habits people develop when using language. An interesting question is whether it is possible to identify a particular individual based on these habits.

This issue was explored in a fascinating way in a paper by Ryan Boyd and by University of Texas colleague Jamie Pennebaker in the May, 2015 issue of Psychological Science.

They looked at a play that was published in 1728 by Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood. Theobald said that the play had been written jointly by William Shakepeare and his contemporary John Fletcher. Shakespeare and Fletcher did collaborate, so that is not a strange assertion. Boyd and Pennebaker set out to see whether aspects of the language used could help to determine who wrote the play.

Some of the aspects of language they used are ones that are fairly obvious. For example, just as I tend to say “apparently,” there are lots of words or phrases that are not commonly used, but particular people use them often. They looked for these kinds of uncommon words and phrases.

Other aspects of language are less obvious. For example, in Pennebaker’s great book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, he points out that people often differ in the way they use the structural words of language like pronouns. Other work suggests that people differ in the complexity of the language the use. They differ in the length of the words they pick and the complexity of the sentences they write. Finally, studies suggest that people also differ in how frequently they use different kinds of words, like those that express emotions, discuss social relationships, or focus on action.

Pennebaker and Boyd gathered examples of writing that are known to have been done by Theobald, Shakespeare, and Fletcher. They compared these different aspects of language use for the plays known to have been written by each author to the text of Double Falsehood. They looked both at the play overall as well as at each of the five acts of the play separately.

Overall, these aspects of language use in the play were much more similar to the language used in plays by Shakespeare than by either Theobald or Fletcher. However, when looking at each act separately, there was a tendency for that language to be most similar to Shakespeare’s language in the early acts of the play, with a greater similarity to Fletcher’s language later in the play. There was a slight tendency for some acts to use some rare words that Theobald uses.

Looking at this overall, then, the language used in the plays suggests that Shakespeare and Fletcher did collaborate on this play, with Shakespeare having more influence earlier in the play, and Fletcher having increasing influence later. Theobald may have edited the play a bit, which is why some of the words he uses frequently do appear in the play more than would be expected by chance.

The fascinating aspect of this work is that many of the elements of language that you do not think about explicitly leave a hidden signature in the things you say and write. Your language habits help to distinguish your words and sentences from those of other people.

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