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Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives

Gustave Cortal, Alain Finkel

TL;DR

This paper addresses the lack of a formal framework for analyzing how personal narratives encode subjective experience. It proposes a sequence-based approach that treats linguistic choices as tokens drawn from feature alphabets grounded in systemic functional linguistics, enabling automatic extraction and pattern analysis. Through a DreamBank case study, it demonstrates how substrings, similarity measures, and clustering reveal psychologically meaningful patterns, including two distinctive templates in a war veteran’s dream narratives. The work suggests practical applications in authorship profiling and style-conditioned narrative generation, and outlines future directions that integrate complexity measures and broader linguistic features for trauma research and therapeutic contexts.

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.

Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives

TL;DR

This paper addresses the lack of a formal framework for analyzing how personal narratives encode subjective experience. It proposes a sequence-based approach that treats linguistic choices as tokens drawn from feature alphabets grounded in systemic functional linguistics, enabling automatic extraction and pattern analysis. Through a DreamBank case study, it demonstrates how substrings, similarity measures, and clustering reveal psychologically meaningful patterns, including two distinctive templates in a war veteran’s dream narratives. The work suggests practical applications in authorship profiling and style-conditioned narrative generation, and outlines future directions that integrate complexity measures and broader linguistic features for trauma research and therapeutic contexts.

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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 32 sections, 1 equation, 8 figures, 5 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Categorizing Linguistic Features
  3. Functions of language
  4. Systemic functional linguistics
  5. Processes, participants, and circumstances
  6. Capturing Sequential Patterns
  7. Formalizing Choice
  8. Grammar as a system of meaningful choices
  9. Formal representation of feature systems
  10. Sequence Analysis
  11. Substrings and subsequences
  12. Analogy with computational biology
  13. Similarity measures
  14. Clustering
  15. Representative sequences
  16. ...and 17 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: Top substring between viet and norm.
  • Figure 2: Dendrogram for viet based on substrings of size one, two, and three.
  • Figure 3: Top substring between blind and norm.
  • Figure 4: Top substring between merri and norm.
  • Figure 5: Top substring odds ratio between ed and norm.
  • ...and 3 more figures