Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 43, Issue 3, 2021

Acting in treatment: A linguistic-stylistic study of correlations between language use and well-being

The aim of this article is to show what a linguistic-stylistic approach can offer for the study of correlations between language use and well-being, in which quantitative and qualitative analysis go hand in hand. As a case study, we investigate whether there are differences in the language used by recovered and non-recovered adolescents who followed the online FitNet treatment for chronic fatique syndrome (CFS). More specifically, we analyzed whether there are differences between both groups in their use of five linguistic means that hide agency. Our results indicate that this is the case indeed: non-recovered patients used these linguistic means more often than recovered patients. In addition, both patient groups show a different development during the therapy: while non-recovered patients increased their use of these stylistic phenomena during the treatment, recovered patients decreased their use of these same phenomena. As such, our study shows that there is indeed a correlation between the use of certain formulations in the language used by patients with CFS and (a change in) their well-being. It is argued that the linguistic means that we investigated, could not have been analysed with a purely computational approach, and that a linguistic-stylistic approach is thus of added value for studying correlations between language use and recovery.

Secondary school teachers expect students to write comprehensible paragraphs in their texts. However, an explicit way of teaching to write a paragraph doesn’t exist. This article describes a text analytic study of compliance with language norms in paragraphs in two genres: e-mails with a request and persuasive texts. It addresses the question to what extent the paragraphs of thirteen- and seventeen-year-old students comply with the paragraph norms constructed on the basis of Dutch professional advisory books. Our findings indicate that students in Dutch secondary school have difficulty writing adequate paragraphs. Our results additionally suggest that students’ paragraph skills increase over time and vary across genres.