Part 1: Language Use and Status

For this part of the assignment, we collected emails members of Team 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team had sent to high status people, which included emails to people such as professors, employers, and the like. We also assembled a collection of 25 emails to low status people, which included our peers or anyone we oversee for projects, etc. The definition of high status was different for the undergraduate students and our graduate partner.

A semantic analysis of the words used in each of the different conditions indicated that no specific kind of word was particularly prevalent in the emails. Although some types of words were used far more frequently in one condition in another, no category exceeded a 0.46% frequency. In this particular case, a fraction of a percent of words about politics or science, for example, meant that the words would be insignificant to the overall discourse. This overall infrequency indicates that there is no specific subcategory of the Semantic Tagset that is use more often in high or low status conversation. Instead, the words used probably vary from situation to situation, not from status to status. It makes sense to think that people use the same semantics to discuss, for example, politics, whether talking about politics with a friend or a professor. Where, then, do people vary the words they use?

Interestingly, the use of preceding nouns of title, with a frequency of 0.35% (less than the percentage of the semantic words we deemed insignificant) is possibly one of the more striking results of the analysis of the parts of speech. These terms, which (in our case) included “Ms.” and “Professor” were used six times in emails to people of high status, but were not used at all in emails to low status people. The use of these nouns indicates that people take a stance of deference when communicating with people they consider to be high status.

Two other parts of speech used in the high status emails more frequently than in the low status emails were “for”, as a preposition, and the past participle of a verb (in our case, words such as “given” were used). These words seem to be words that are used for explanation or excuse - perhaps people feel that they need to explain themselves more when speaking to a person of high status.

In the emails to people of low status, one part of speech that was used more often was the third person singular subjective pronoun, such as "he" or "she". In general, these words are used with a sense of informality or familiarity. In an email to a person of high status, on the other hand, someone might be more likely to repeatedly refer to people by name or title (e.g. “Professor Hancock was..., and the professor said...” as opposed to “Jeff was..., and he said...”), which could explain the infrequency of these pronouns in the high status emails.

Overall, then, our analysis indicates that when people email people of high status, the semantics do not vary between statuses. However, the parts of speech do vary: people use words that refer to a person’s title and that give explanations and excuses for actions when they talk to a person of high status. The words used in emails to low status people are not exactly the converse of this; instead, they are simply different. In particular, the words indicate a sense of familiarity and informality. These differences make sense when we consider the social norms when communicating with someone of high verses low status.