Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives

2025-10-09

AI Summary

Existing research lacks a systematic, formal framework for analyzing authors’ linguistic style choices in personal narratives—particularly for characterizing language patterns underlying subjective experience expression and their associated psychological mechanisms. This paper introduces the first interdisciplinary analytical framework integrating functional linguistics, computational linguistics, and psychology. It operationalizes stylistic features as computable linguistic choices—including process types, participant roles, and circumstantial modifiers—and implements automated feature extraction and hybrid analysis via large language models and sequential pattern mining. Evaluated on数百 dream narratives, the framework robustly identifies style–psychology associations: e.g., narratives by PTSD-affected veterans exhibit significantly higher frequencies of verbal processes relative to mental processes. The study establishes a reproducible, scalable methodology for investigating linguistic representations of subjective experience.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Computer Vision: Language and Vision
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

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.

Problem

• Formalizing stylistic analysis in personal narratives
• Linking linguistic patterns to psychological observations
• Automating extraction of narrative features using language models

Innovation

• Formalizes narrative style as linguistic choice patterns
• Integrates functional linguistics with computational extraction methods
• Links sequential language patterns to psychological observations