Person vs. situation - Explorations of individual language use across discourse types and personality traits - Doctor of Philosophy

Sep 17, 2026

Authorship analysis studies often assume that individual language use is stable across situations and distinctive enough to separate authors, yet research remains limited when scenarios shift across genres or production modes. This thesis addresses those gaps and the frequent neglect of personality in linguistics, where existing approaches can yield misleading generalizations affecting profiling practice. Based on three empirical studies, it examines language distinctiveness and stability, tests links to personality traits via statistical analyses, and applies a context-sensitive corpus-informed method combining keyness and qualitative linguistic analysis.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages333

Reading Time13 h 59 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

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Acknowledgements

Person vs. situation: Explorations of individual language use across discourse types and personality traits Julija Danu Doctor of Philosophy Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics Aston University September 30, 2025 © Julija Danu, 2025 Julija Danu asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this thesis. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright belongs to its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without appropriate permission or acknowledgement. Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics Aston University Person vs. situation: Explorations of individual language use across discourse types and personality traits Julija Danu Doctor of Philosophy 2025 Abstract Authorship analysis studies tend to rely on the concept of idiolect, and on the assumptions that individual language use is consistent enough across situations, and distinctive enough to differentiate it from other individuals. Despite the acknowledged difficulty of authorship analysis across situations (e.g. , genres or modes of production), such scenarios are scarcely researched. This lack of research, however, has considerable implications for forensic casework. Furthermore, the concept of personality is often ignored in linguistic research, and most studies on the relationship between language and personality are rarely linguistically informed and tend to employ approaches which produce misleading generalizations that can lead to misuse in profiling. This work, based on three empirical studies, addresses these gaps and takes a mixed-method approach to examining the nature of individual differences in language use across situations, and the links between language use and personality. Study 1, focused on linguistic distinctiveness and stability, offers novel conceptualizations and compares possible measures of the phenomena. Study 2 explores the associations between these phenomena and personality traits through statistical analyses. Finally, Study 3 offers a context-sensitive and linguistically informed approach to exploring personality differences projected through language use, combining keyness analysis with qualitative linguistic analyses involving corpus linguistic tools. Overall, this work demonstrates that there is a great range of variation in the distinctiveness and stability of individual language use across situations even in a relatively small and homogenous sample of individuals, and offers an exploratory typology of potentially individuating language patterns. Further, it identifies four personality traits which have stronger associations with individual stability and distinctiveness and highlights how these associations can be obscured by other intervening factors. Finally, through examining language patterns across those traits further, this work identifies personality differences projected through language and suggests language patterns that are more likely to display those differences. Keywords: idiolect, individual language use, distinctiveness and stability across discourse types, language and personality, individuating language patterns, authorship analysis and profiling Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without Krzysztof Kredens, who gave me and my project a chance without knowing me at all, made the data collection possible, and provided me with invaluable guidance in these three years. Likewise, my associate supervisors Nicci MacLeod and Craig Hedge were always there for me, offering support and advice considerably beyond this project. I could not wish for better supervisors. My supervisors from a seemingly distant past, Angeliek van Hout and Remco Knooihuizen from the University of Groningen, also deserve special gratitude. It was them who saw my potential and inspired me to pursue research in the first place, even when I di

FAQs

What problem in authorship analysis does the thesis focus on?

It focuses on the limited research on how individual language use holds up across situations such as genres or production modes, despite its importance for forensic casework.

How does the thesis incorporate personality into linguistic analysis?

It examines how personality traits relate to language use, critiquing prior work for producing misleading generalizations and applying linguistically informed methods.

What methods are used across the three empirical studies?

Study 1 compares and conceptualizes measures of linguistic distinctiveness and stability, Study 2 uses statistical analyses to test associations with personality traits, and Study 3 combines keyness analysis with qualitative corpus-informed linguistic analysis to explore personality differences projected through language.

Sep 17, 2026

Uploaded by Bill Black