Formalizing Style in Personal Narratives
Authors: name: Gustave Cortal; name: Alain Finkel
Published: 2025-10-09 06:48:06

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.