Verbal Behavior and Personality Assessmentsional patients who demonstrated a need to justify unconventional
beliefs (Weintraub and Aronson 1965).
While reading these clinical illustrations, the reader may have
been struck by the similarity of the grammatical structures studied
to defense or coping mechanisms described in the psychoanalytic lit-
erature. Adversative expressions seem to reflect the mechanism of
"undoing," while explanatory expressions seem to reflect the mecha-
nism of "rationalization." In fact, almost all the categories used in
our verbal analyses have been described by clinicians as reflecting
important ways of dealing with psychological stress.
We do not assume that every use of an adversative or causative
expression reflects impulsivity or rationalization, respectively, only
that individuals with impulsive and compulsive tendencies will
choose such structures more frequently than persons not so disposed.
Adversative and causative conjunctions and phrases are examples of
grammatical structures that are easily recognized. Naive judges can
be taught to identify and score them with little training.
Our method of verbal behavior analysis rests upon three assump-
tions: (i) patterns of thinking and behaving are reflected in styles of
speaking; (2) under stress, a speaker's choice of grammatical struc-
tures will mirror characteristic coping mechanisms; and (3) person-
ality traits are revealed by grammatical structures having a slow rate
of change.
Transformational Grammar and Verbal Style
Why do different people use different grammatical structures to con-
vey the same message? "John loved Mary" and "Mary was loved by
John" are two correct ways of saying the same thing. Transforma-
tional grammarians would say that they constitute different surface
structures derived from a common deep structure. Every language is
considered to have transformational rules that allow its speakers to say
the same thing in different ways. Although in our example the two
sentences are identical in meaning, they differ noticeably in style.
When verbal styles of different individuals are compared, we are, in a
way, comparing preferences for transformational rules. Why a partic-
ular person chooses one rather than another grammatical structure is
related, in our view, to personality factors. The sentence "John loved
Mary" may be too assertive for certain people who prefer the more