Using Syntactic and Semantic Context to Explore Psychodemographic Differences in Self-reference

摘要

Psychological analysis of language has repeatedly shown that an individual’s rate of mentioning 1st person singular pronouns predicts a wealth of important demographic and psychological factors. However, these analyses are performed out of context — syntactic and semantic — which may change the magnitude or even direction of such relationships. In this paper, we put “pronouns in their context”, exploring the relationship between self-reference and age, gender, and depression depending on syntactic position and verbal governor. We find that pronouns are over-all more predictive when taking dependency relations and verb semantic categories into account, and, the direction of the relationship can change depending on the semantic class of the verbal governor.