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James Pennebaker wrote about this in "The Secret Life of Pronouns". It was a good book released late last year.

He also does twitter stream analysis using his research and you can find that here --> http://analyzewords.com

People might dismiss it as tripe, but after you've read some of his assertions and look over your own emails you'll probably believe it makes a bit of sense.

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I thought Pennebaker found an absolute correlation between status and pronoun usage (e.g. higher-status uses "we" more than lower-status), where this work seems to be about relative patterns between individuals.

He didn't really have a definite pattern for higher status except they used more articles, however lower status used more "I"s.

Yet later in the book he also mentioned mirrored language and who reflects who. He also had some sort of web program that measured the difference between the two. I think that correlates with the goals of this study.

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