Notice that all of the words in the table are quite short and are made up exclusively of pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. If we extended the list to all of the common stealth or function words in English, the list would include around 450 words. Indeed, these 450 words account for over half (55 percent) of all the words we use.
THE MOST FREQUENTLY USED WORDS ACROSS BOTH SPOKEN AND WRITTEN TEXTS
RANK
WORD
PERCENTAGE
OF ALL WORDS
1
I
3.64
2
the
3.48
3
and
2.92
4
to
2.91
5
a
1.94
6
of
1.83
7
that
1.48
8
in
1.29
9
it
1.19
10
my
1.08
11
is
1.06
12
you
1.05
13
was
1.01
14
for
0.80
15
have
0.70
16
with
0.67
17
he
0.66
18
me
0.64
19
on
0.63
20
but
0.62
To put this in perspective, the average English speaker has an impressive vocabulary of perhaps one hundred thousand words. This means that only a trivial percentage of the words we know are associated with linguistic style—about 0.04 percent of all words. The other 99.96 percent of our vocabulary is made up of content words. This split is comparable in other languages—German, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Korean, and others we have studied. In all languages, a small number of function words are used at dizzying rates compared to a large number of content words that are used at very low rates.
Briefly consider the implications of these numbers. If you want to learn a new language such as German or Finnish, you can pick up almost half the language in an afternoon. Most anyone can master the top one hundred stealth words with minimal training. By early evening, you could sit down with any German newspaper or Finnish philosophy text and identify half of the words that were used. The only downside is that you would have absolutely no idea what you were reading.
FUNCTION WORDS: THEY’RE SHORT AND ALMOST INVISIBLE
Look back at the top twenty function words. You will notice that seventeen of the twenty words are three letters or fewer in length. The most common words in every language tend to be short and are usually a single, easy-to-pronounce syllable.
Not only are stealth words short, they are hard to perceive. One reason we have trouble spotting the high usage of function words in the Lincoln speech is that our brains naturally slide over them. We automatically focus on content-related words instead. The invisibility is also evident in the ways we remember words. Think, for example, of the last conversation you had with someone. Can you recall any specific words that the other person spoke? In all likelihood, you remember only the content words.
Perhaps the strongest test of invisibility is in actively trying to listen to people’s use of style versus content words. Sit by a television or radio or simply begin listening to people speaking around you. Consciously try to attend to style-related words. You will note that they are spoken extremely quickly—lingering, on average, for less than two-tenths of a second. In fact, this speed is often used in psychology experiments to present words or pictures that are just barely perceptible. Assuming you are able to pay attention to these words for a few minutes, you will find that you lose track of what the content of the conversation is. It is almost impossible to attend to function words on their own.
THE AMAZING CASE OF JOHN KERRY AND HIS INVISIBLE PRONOUNS
In the 2004 presidential campaign, Democrat John Kerry was running for president against the incumbent George W. Bush. In the months running up to the election, Bush’s popularity ratings were suffering and Kerry posed a serious threat. A recurring problem with Kerry, however, was that he came across as aloof and somewhat arrogant. When he spoke, his body language was rigid and standoffish. His speeches and interviews tended to sound wooden and inauthentic.
According to a New York Times article, in an attempt to appear more warm, Kerry’s advisers were working with him to use we-words (e.g., we, us, our) more and I-words less. On reading the article, it was clear that Kerry was in trouble.
As will be detailed later, use of I-words is associated with being honest and personal, and when politicians use them, we-words sound cold, rigid, and emotionally distant. At the time, Kerry was already using we-words at twice the rate of Bush and I-words at half Bush’s rate. Kerry’s advisers, who were some of the smartest people in the country, failed to understand how invisible stealth words worked.
This should be an important lesson. Function words are almost impossible to hear and your stereotypes about how they work may well be wrong.
Another surprising aspect of stealth words is that they are very hard to master after about age twelve. Learning another language as an adult is usually quite difficult. However, most people can quickly learn the words for objects, numbers, and colors. They can also memorize the words for, in, above, with, and related words. But mastering the use of most common function words in an ongoing conversation is far more difficult. In fact, you can usually tell if someone is not a native English speaker by looking at their writing. Their errors will likely be in their use of style words rather than any nouns or regular verbs.
STYLE WORDS AND THE BRAIN
The distinction between style and content words can also be seen in people who suffer from brain damage. Occasionally, a person will have a stroke or other brain injury that affects a highly specific location on the left side of the brain. If it is in one area, the person can lose the ability to use content words but still retain the ability to use function words. Strokes in other areas can produce the opposite results.
The two brain areas of interest—Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area—are usually located on the outer surface of the left side of the brain, called the cerebral cortex.
Broca’s area, named after the nineteenth-century French surgeon Paul Broca, is located in the frontal lobe. In the 1860s, Broca published a series of articles reporting that damage to Broca’s area was often associated with patients speaking in a painfully slow and disconnected way. More striking, however, is that they often were unable to use function words effectively. As an example, if a Broca’s patient were asked to describe the picture at the beginning of the chapter, he or she might say, “Girl … ummm … woman … ahh … picture, uhhh … old. OK. Old woman.” Often, Broca patients are socially awkward and frustrated by their inability to communicate with others.
The discovery of Broca’s area became more significant several years later when Carl Wernicke published his observations about another brain area in the temporal lobe of the brain now called Wernicke’s area. Damage to this area resulted in a completely different set of symptoms. Specifically, Wernicke damage often results in people’s inability to use nouns and regular verbs while, at the same time, they freely use function words. A Wernicke patient who is asked to describe the same picture might say something like, “Well, right here is one of them and I think she’s next to that one. So if I see over there you’ll see her too. Let’s see. I’m thinking of her now. She’s over there.”
To say that Broca’s area controls style words and Wernicke’s controls content words is a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, it points to the fact that the dis
tinction between content and style words is occurring at a fairly basic level in the brain.
Particularly noteworthy is that Broca’s area—the region linked to function words—is in the frontal lobe of the brain. The frontal lobe controls a number of skills, many of them social. For example, dozens of studies have demonstrated how frontal areas are linked to abilities to express and conceal emotions. Other frontal areas are associated with the ability to read other people’s facial expressions. A number of promising studies now suggest that many of our abilities to control our emotions and to establish social relations with others are related to frontal lobe activity.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of frontal lobe damage and changes in social behavior and personality was the case of Phineas Gage. Gage was an explosives expert for a railroad in the mid-1800s. By all accounts, he was a careful, conscientious, and serious individual. One summer day, he was tamping down some blasting powder in preparation for an explosion to clear some rocks. He accidentally created a spark with his long tamping rod that ignited the powder, causing the rod to shoot upward, where it neatly tore a hole through his skull and destroyed much of his frontal lobe. To everyone’s amazement, Gage wasn’t killed and he returned to good health within a few weeks. That is, except for the hole in the front of his head. Over the next months, Phineas Gage’s personality changed dramatically. He went from reserved to loud, from conscientious to impulsive, from respectful to obscene, and from sober to, well, not sober. He was a completely different person and never returned to his old personality.
In the early 1900s, Ivan Pavlov noted the same thing in his research with dogs. Pavlov, who won one of the first Nobel Prizes, is best remembered for his experiments where a dog could be trained to salivate when a bell rang. In a failed attempt to find the location of classical conditioning in the brain, Pavlov surgically disrupted different parts of dogs’ brains. He reported that only damage to the frontal lobe affected the animal’s personality. Although the dogs with frontal lobe injury still remembered things from before the surgery, they were simply different dogs.
If the frontal lobe is closely linked to personality and social behaviors, it is not surprising that any language areas in the frontal lobe—such as Broca’s area—would also be related to personality and social behaviors.
FUNCTION WORDS ARE VERY VERY SOCIAL
Brain research points to the inescapable conclusion that function words are related to our social worlds. In fact, stealth words by their very nature are social.
Imagine you are walking down the street on a windy afternoon and a piece of paper lands on the ground in front of you. There is a handwritten note on the paper that says:
The note is grammatically correct and is understandable in a certain sense. Is something important about to happen? Certainly there is an urgency. But, really, we have no idea what this person is talking about. Every word in the note is a function word. Who and where is “he”? When is “will be” and “soon”? Who is “I”? Where is “here”? What shouldn’t the person do? Now that you think about it, this note makes absolutely no sense.
In a normal conversation, we automatically know what all the function words refer to based on who we are speaking to, where we are, and what we have already been talking about. Whoever wrote the note had a shared understanding with its intended recipient about the who, where, and when. Maybe the note was typed by some guy named Bob to be read by Julia. A few minutes earlier, they might have had the following discussion:
BOB (ON CELL PHONE TALKING TO JULIA): Julia, you caught me at a crazy time. I’ve got to buy a stapler but I’ll leave a note on the door if I’m not here when you arrive.
JULIA: Great. I need to have the accountant sign my expense form. Do you know where he is?
BOB: I’ll see if he’s in …
JULIA: Did I tell you that I’m thinking of smoking again? I always feel more alert and happy when I smoke. I know it annoys you.
BOB: Are you nuts? Let’s talk about this. Gotta go. See you later.
All of a sudden, we know that “He is around” = the accountant is somewhere in the building, “I” = Bob, “will be back very soon” = Bob will be back at work within maybe thirty minutes of when the note was written, “Don’t do it” = Julia really shouldn’t start smoking again.
What’s interesting is that this note has real meaning only for Bob and Julia on a specific day in a specific location. If Julia finds the note in a week it will no longer make sense. Any stranger who happens on the note will not have the keys to unlock the meanings of all of these function words.
Function words require social skills to use properly. The speaker assumes that the listener knows who everyone is. The listener must be paying attention and know the speaker to follow the conversation. So the mere ability to understand a simple conversation chock-full of function words demands social knowledge.
The same is true for articles, prepositions, and all other stealth words. Consider these slightly different sentences:
“I can’t believe that he gave her the ring.”
“I can’t believe that he gave her a ring.”
The difference between “the” ring and “a” ring is subtle but significant. If the word the is present, it means that the speaker is referring to a specific ring that the listener has some knowledge of. The sentence with “a” ring, in contrast, suggests something very different about the evolving relationship between “him” and “her.” More important, “a” ring tells us that the speaker and listener do not have a shared knowledge of the particular ring that was given.
All function words work similarly in that they are tied to the personal relationship between the speaker and listener. Even the author of a book and the book’s reader must enter into a shared social world. If I now make reference to the earlier paragraph about Julia’s smoking, you instantly know what I, now, to, the, earlier, and about refer to. Had that same phrase been written three pages ago, no one would have been able to figure it out. All function words, such as before, over, and to, require a basic awareness of the speaker’s location in time and space. The ability to use them, then, is a marker of basic social skills. On the other hand, talking about nouns and verbs demands the ability to understand culturally shared categories and definitions.
What’s so amazing is that our brains are able to decide which function words to use almost instantaneously. Assuming you are a native English speaker, no one has ever sat down with you and explained the difference between using a and the. If we are talking with someone we have never met and casually mention a particular window in the room, two minutes later both of us will know which window when it is referred to as “the window.” Similarly, when we later refer to it as being clean, we will remember that “it” = the window.
Function words also reflect and color subtle ways we think about objects and events in our lives. With prepositions and other function words, as with articles and pronouns, we are able to make linguistic shifts as quickly as we can speak. It’s hard to imagine stopping a conversation in midsentence to decide whether you should say “I went to my friend’s house” versus “I went over to my friend’s house” versus “I went by my friend’s house.” The differences among to, over to, and by are almost imperceptible to the listener but they all have a slightly different meaning about the trip or the friend or the friend’s house.
As a final note, we are not capable of easily controlling how and when we use function words. They are hard for us to perceive in others and to control in ourselves. They are processed in our brains extremely quickly and efficiently. All the time, our brain is remembering recent references to a person or object so that we can use the right pronouns and articles in the next sentence.
BEYOND ENGLISH: FUNCTION WORDS AS CULTURAL CLUES
Every language must be able to distinguish between “a table” and “the table,” between “she” and “he,” and between “going to a store” and “going by a store.” In some languages these distinctions are signaled by
separate function words and in others, they are added to a surrounding noun or verb. The ways that function words are used differ by culture and often tell us something about the culture itself.
In our research on function words, my students, colleagues, and I have developed the LIWC computer program for use with a number of languages, including Spanish, German, Arabic, Italian, French, Russian, Dutch, Chinese, and others. So far, virtually all the language links to social and psychological phenomena we have found in English have generalized to other languages. In developing cross-language text analysis programs, we come across unique issues every time we begin exploring a new language.
Pronoun Dropping
In some languages, separate words for pronouns are rarely used. In Spanish, for example, estoy triste literally means “am sad.” The word “I” is not needed since the personal pronoun is implicit in the verb conjugation. Of course, a speaker could say “Yo estoy triste,” which would be the equivalent of “I am sad,” with a strong emphasis on the word I. As discussed in the emotion chapter, when English speakers are depressed, they tend to use the word I more in everyday language—apparently because they are paying more attention to themselves. Spanish speakers, when they are depressed, greatly increase in their use of the first-person singular pronoun, yo.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 4
