Personality Factors in Spoken Discourse

Accounting for individual variation is in itself rather complex. The overall goal is to be able to take account of individual differences (without reducing them to idiosyncrasies) and, identifying regularities, arrive at a synthesis. The attention drawn on different features of individual variation, as well the way that different scholars deal with it, varies according to the field of interest and to the theoretical models' level of abstraction. In different frameworks individual variation is from time to time treated as carrying sociological, cultural, cognitive, stylistic, and sometimes psychological values. Exploring the relationships between linguistic features and psychological traits one risks being mired in a swamp: even if it is the layman's common practice to identify individuals in terms of their psychological attributes and to do so relying on their language, the challenge for the linguist is to identify the systematic correlations among the linguistic and psychological aspects. Given these premises, it has seemed useful to adopt an expository strategy referring to those fields of linguistic research in which individual variation is taken into consideration, showing how different paradigms account for it, and then referring to those in which the aspects connected to personality factors are investigated.