DR. JAMES PENNEBAKER - The Secret Life of Pronouns

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Adult Event

Start: 09/01/2011 7:30 pm

University of Texas professor
DR. JAMES PENNEBAKER
will speak and sign his new book,
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us.

We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, we’ve zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to laptops, text messages to tweets.Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel. In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics—in essence, counting the frequency of words we use—to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. You’ll learn why it’s bad when politicians use “we” instead of “I,” what Lady Gaga and William Butler Yeats have in common, and how Ebenezer Scrooge’s syntax hints at his self-deception and repressed emotion. Barack Obama, Sylvia Plath, and King Lear are among the figures who make cameo appearances in this sprightly, surprising tour of what our words are saying—whether we mean them to or not.

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