How Henry Hellyer’s Use of Language Foretold His Suicide

Crisis ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 288-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna L. Baddeley ◽  
Gwyneth R. Daniel ◽  
James W. Pennebaker
Keyword(s):  
Negative Emotion ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Emotion Word ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Pronoun Use ◽  
First Person Plural

Background: Henry Hellyer was an accomplished surveyor and explorer in Australia in the early 1800s whose apparent suicide at the age of 42 has puzzled historians for generations. He left behind several written works, including letters, journals, and reports. Aims: The current study assessed changes in the ways Hellyer used words in his various written documents during the last 7 years of his life. Methods: Hellyer’s writings were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. Results: Hellyer showed increases in first-person singular pronoun use, decreases in first-person plural pronoun use, and increases in negative emotion word use. As this is a single, uncontrolled case study, caution is recommended in generalizing from the current results. Conclusions: Results suggest Hellyer’s increasing self-focused attention, social isolation, and negative emotion. Findings are consistent with increasing depression and suicidal ideation. Implications for using computerized text analysis to decode people’s psychological states from their written records are discussed.

Does it matter whether we or I talk about us? Distinguishing we-talk in couples’ conflict discussions and partners’ private thoughts before and after conflict

2021 ◽  
pp. 026540752110511
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Wilson ◽  
Lisa M Jaremka ◽  
Christopher P Fagundes ◽  
Rebecca Andridge ◽  
Janice K Kiecolt-Glaser
Keyword(s):  
Married Couples ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Emotion Word ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Marital Problem ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The Stability

According to extensive evidence, we-talk—couples’ use of first-person, plural pronouns—predicts better relationship quality and well-being. However, prior work has not distinguished we-talk by its context, which varies widely across studies. Also, little is known about we-talk’s consistency over time. To assess the stability and correlates of we-talk in private versus conversational contexts, 43 married couples’ language was captured during a marital problem discussion and in each partner’s privately recorded thoughts before and after conflict. Participants were asked to describe any current thoughts and feelings in the baseline thought-listing and to focus on their reaction to the conflict itself in the post-conflict sample. Couples repeated this protocol at a second study visit, approximately 1 month later. We-talk in baseline and post-conflict thought-listings was largely uncorrelated with we-talk during conflict discussions, but each form of we-talk was consistent between the two study visits. Their correlates were also distinct: more we-talk during conflict was associated with less hostility during conflict, whereas more baseline we-talk predicted greater closeness in both partners, as well as lower vocally encoded arousal and more positive emotion word use in partners after conflict. These novel data reveal that we-talk can be meaningfully distinguished by its context—whether language is sampled from private thoughts or marital discussions, and whether the study procedure requests relationship talk. Taken together, these variants of we-talk may have unique implications for relationship function and well-being.

A deixis emocional em português europeu contemporâneo: alguns contributos

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-235
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Macário Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
First Person Plural

This paper is a contribution to the description of the structures that express emotional deixis, in European contemporary Portuguese. The analysis of our empirical data show that, in Portuguese, demonstratives are not the only category that encodes emotional deictic meaning; possessives and first person plural display the same function, in some contexts. It is also discussed the semantic bleaching of the deictic space adverbs cá and lá and it is argued that it can only be described and explained in illocutionary terms, and not in the framework of emotional deixis.

Colloquial features in Word Englishes

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Collins ◽  
Xinyue Yao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American English ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
Evolutionary Status ◽  
First Person ◽  
Functional Interpretation ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
World English ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Grammatical Change

A powerful discourse-pragmatic agent of grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century has been the increasing acceptance of colloquialism. Little is known, however, about its influence on grammatical developments in regional varieties of World English other than the two inner circle ‘supervarieties’, British and American English. This paper reports findings from a corpus-based study of three grammatical categories known to be undergoing a colloquialism-related rise in contemporary English, across a range of registers in ten World Englishes: quasi-modals (have to, have got to, be going to, want to), get-passives, and first person plural inclusive let’s. In each case comparisons are drawn with non-colloquial variants: modals (must, should, will, shall), be-passives, and let us. Subsequent functional interpretation of the data is used to explore the effect upon the quantitative patterns identified of the phenomenon of colloquialism and of further factors with which it interacts (including Americanism, prescriptivism, and evolutionary status).

Emotion Word Use by Adolescents Who Stutter: An Exploratory Study

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Corrin G. Richels ◽  
Rogge Jessica
Keyword(s):  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Conversational Speech ◽  
Word Count ◽  
Word Use ◽  
Emotion Words ◽  
Emotion Word ◽  
Linguistic Inquiry ◽  
Positive Valence ◽  
Analyze Data

Purpose: Deficits in the ability to use emotion vocabulary may result in difficulties for adolescents who stutter (AWS) and may contribute to disfluencies and stuttering. In this project, we aimed to describe the emotion words used during conversational speech by AWS. Methods: Participants were 26 AWS between the ages of 12 years, 5 months and 15 years, 11 months-old (n=4 females, n=22 males). We drew personal narrative samples from the UCLASS database. We used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze data samples for numbers of emotion words. Results: Results indicated that the AWS produced significantly higher numbers of emotion words with a positive valence. AWS tended to use the same few positive emotion words to the near exclusion of words with negative emotion valence. Conclusion: A lack of diversity in emotion vocabulary may make it difficult for AWS to engage in meaningful discourse about negative aspects of being a person who stutters

Are we visible? An interdisciplinary data-based study of self-mention in research articles

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Khedri
Keyword(s):  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Environmental Engineering ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Subjective Strategies ◽  
First Person Plural

AbstractResearch articles have often materialized through the use of impersonal objective strategies viz. abstract rhetors, passive constructions, and nominalizations. However, intrusive or subjective strategies, such as self-mentions, appear to integrate impersonal structures. As a rhetorical strategy to explicitly portray authorial selves, self-mentions help writers to project themselves into the discourse by marketing themselves and demarcating their original contribution to the field. Here, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted to examine explicit authorial presence in a comparable corpus of 40 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering, and chemistry by taking into consideration: (i) the frequency of using exclusive first person plural pronouns (

Inclusive and exclusive uses of we in four American textbooks for multicultural teacher education

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 625-647
Author(s):  
Baburhan Uzum ◽  
Bedrettin Yazan ◽  
Ali Fuad Selvi
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Positioning Theory ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Multicultural Teacher Education ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Multicultural Teacher

This study analyses four American multicultural teacher education textbooks for instances of inclusive and exclusive representations through the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e. we, us, our, ours). Positioning theory is used as a theoretical framework to examine the textbook authors’ uses of first person plural pronouns and to understand how these pronouns perform reflexive and interactive positioning and fluidly (re)negotiate and (re)delineate the borders between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ The findings suggest that first person plural pronouns are used extensively in the focal textbooks to refer to such groups as authors, Americans, humans, teachers, and teacher educators. Expressing differing levels of ambiguity in interpretation, these pronouns play significant roles in the discursive representations of inclusivity and exclusivity across topics of multicultural education. This study implicates that language teachers should use criticality and reflexivity when approaching exclusionary discourses and representations that neglect the particularities of individuals from different cultures.

Did Paul Really Think He Wasn’t Going to Die?

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
J. Andrew Doole
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
First Person Plural

AbstractIt is often claimed that Paul expected the Lord to return in glory within his lifetime, based in part on the text of 1 Thess 4:13–18. Those who have a theological interest in denying Paul’s mistaken optimism have to bend over backwards to explain why this wasn’t the case. The use of the First Person Plural in this passage however may be indicative that Paul was not actually making this claim for himself at all. Both the content and the context suggest rather that Paul, Silvanus and Timothy were providing the Thessalonian Christians with a “soundbite” for mutual and reciprocal encouragement when they met as a community. Indeed, Paul may have used First Person Plural soundbites throughout his ministry.

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