28 Impersonal pronouns
Pennebaker has identified a comprehensive list of impersonal pronouns.69 They make up, on average, 4.96% of English–language production, or roughly one third of all pronoun usage. As a cursory glance at the words comprising this category reveals, these are true function words in the Pennebakerian sense, in that they form the scaffolding on which meaning is hung by content–specific words, and in that they are generally in the background and not heavily emphasized. As such, we would not expect there to be significant variance between the base usage rate of these words and the specific proportion of shareholder letters made up of these words. The LIWC results bear out this supposition, showing that in our English–original texts, impersonal pronouns make up 3.39% of the words employed, with the French–original texts coming in even higher at 3.80%. While in both cases impersonal pronouns are under–represented in the financial communication texts compared with the language overall, the difference is slight enough that it would be hard to make any compelling claims about stylistic or socio–cultural positioning based upon these terms. The difference already detected between pronoun usage in our corpus texts and the English language as a whole must then be mostly a phenomenon of personal pronouns.
The results from BCV are markedly lower in this category than in the baseline, at 2.56%, and in fact are lower than both the English–original texts and the translated shareholder letters, although not the lowest results posted for an individual bank. The general inconsistency of the results in this category when examined bank by bank, ranging from 1.78% at the Royal Bank of Canada to 6.22% at Crédit Mutuel, with no really clear trend distinguishing the translated texts from the English–original letters, marks the impersonal pronoun category as somewhat of an anomaly, and therefore potentially representing an intriguing – or frustrating – line for further research.
Personal pronouns
Pennebaker has compiled a far–ranging list of personal pronouns in his dictionary.70 He has observed that personal pronouns comprise 10.07% of general English language production as observed in his massive (and ever–increasing) corpora. However, this linguistic tithe does not seem to have been forthcoming in our financial annual–reporting
69 Campbell et al., column K.
70 Campbell et al., column E.
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documents. The texts originally written in English show a lower prevalence of personal pronouns, with only 6.52% of their language made up of words from this category. This confirms our supposition above that the stylistic divergence between baseline English and the language style specific to shareholder letters, where pronouns are concerned, is rooted in personal, rather than impersonal, pronouns. But the numbers regarding the translated letters to shareholders show a difference that is much more pronounced, between both the baseline numbers and, more intriguingly for the purposes of this study, the LIWC results for the English–language letters. At only 3.82%, the originally French letters show slightly more than half as much personal pronoun use as that in corresponding letters drafted in English, and just over a third as much personal pronoun usage as is observed in the language generally. Here, then, is the kind of linguistic phenomenon that LIWC can highlight, and an obvious venue for deeper, more qualitative, analytical digging.
The results from BCV are more closely aligned to the English–original texts than the other translations from French, coming in at 6.19%, marking this as a category likely reflecting the application of the research conducted at BCV and developed by Wells, particularly regarding first–person plural pronouns.71 The almost perfectly synchronous letters from English–language banks and BCV show an LSM of only .79 and .76 respectively when compared to baseline English usage, showing that they represent genre conventions which are stronger than the general patterns in language use.
71 Wells 76
30 Graph 4: Usage rates for personal pronouns
Further analysis of the specific sub–categories of personal pronouns should further sharpen the focal point of this target for qualitative analysis using a traditional concordance software package.
First person singular
“I” and associated pronouns are the sub–category of personal pronouns that Pennebaker has observed being used the most extensively in his baseline corpora.72 Indeed, they constitute more than half of all personal pronouns used in English on average, and make up 5.72% of all the words employed in typical communication. It is therefore quite striking to examine the results for this category returned by the processing through LIWC of our corpora of shareholder letters. Letters from our English–language corpus show a vastly lower incidence of “I” word usage, only 0.38% of total words employed, while the translated texts show even less “I” word usage of 0.23% of the total. This means that first–
person singular personal pronouns are used only one fifteenth, or 6.6%, as frequently in shareholder letters written in English as they are in general, an extremely low LSM of .12.
The divergence is even more striking in the French–original letters, where “I” words are used only 4% as frequently as in baseline English, a vanishingly low LSM of .08.
Here, then, is an extremely significant feature of shareholder letters in general, and also a case in which the translated letters do not correlate perfectly. The original to translated
72 Campbell et al., column F.
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Baseline English Translated BCV