Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives
Gustave Cortal, Alain Finkel
2025-10-13
Summary
This research focuses on how people tell stories about their own lives, specifically looking at the way they *write* those stories and what that reveals about how they experience things.
What's the problem?
While we know personal stories are shaped by an author's unique style, there hasn't been a clear, systematic way to actually *analyze* that style and connect it to the author's inner world. It's hard to move beyond just saying someone 'sounds sad' to understanding *how* their writing creates that feeling of sadness.
What's the solution?
The researchers created a new method that combines ideas from how language works, computer science, and psychology. They used computers to automatically identify patterns in the language people use when writing about experiences, like dreams. They looked at things like whether someone focuses more on actions happening *to* them versus what they are thinking or feeling. They tested this method by analyzing stories from a war veteran with PTSD, looking for patterns related to his trauma.
Why it matters?
This work is important because it gives us a tool to understand the link between how people write about their experiences and their psychological state. It could eventually help therapists or researchers better understand someone's internal world just by analyzing their personal narratives, and potentially even identify people who might be struggling with mental health issues.
Abstract
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.