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Style fingerprints
Strip away what a talk is about and what remains is how it is said: the function words, the length and variety of sentences, the pronouns, the punctuation, the habit of citing. This study gives every speaker a fingerprint from those traits alone, maps them, and asks the sociological question: when someone joins the Twelve, does their voice move toward the Twelve's?
What stands out
- Ordination changes a voice. Of the 34 apostles with three or more talks before and after joining the Twelve, 21 moved closer to the contemporaneous style of the Twelve; the mean change is -0.764 standard-deviation units (Wilcoxon p = 0.024). Neil L. Andersen moved most, from 18.77 to 12.25.
- The first axis of style is sentence length; the second is word length. sentence length, paragraph length, that drive the horizontal axis and long words, word length, of the vertical; together they explain 26% of the variance between speakers.
- Sentences got shorter. From 29.78 words in the 1850s to 21.91 in the 2020s, while second-person address went from 1.58 to 1.5 per hundred words.
- Each calling has a style. First Presidency: more do, more here; Patriarch: more may, less lexical variety; Presiding Bishopric: more wherein, more should; Primary: more she, more can.
- The auxiliaries speak in the third person feminine and the second person; the Twelve use the first person singular least of any body.
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Model card
- Data
- 10,420 talks of 300 words or more; 297 speakers with five or more.
- Features
- Rates of 190 function words; mean and standard deviation of sentence length; mean word length; type-token ratio on the first thousand words; share of words of nine letters or more; commas, semicolons, colons, questions, exclamations, dashes and quotation marks per hundred words; first-person singular, first-person plural, second-person and third-person pronoun rates; scripture citations per thousand words; words per paragraph. No content words.
- Map
- Features standardised across talks, averaged per speaker, then the first two principal components.
- Convergence
- For each apostle with three or more talks before and after the year of ordination to the Twelve, the Euclidean distance in standardised feature space from each talk to the mean of talks by other members of the Twelve within five years. Change is the mean after minus the mean before; a paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test across apostles.
- Known failure modes
- Style drifts with era, so a speaker's position partly reflects when they spoke; the convergence design compares each talk to the Twelve of its own time to control for this. Transcription conventions (the Journal of Discourses reporters, the Conference Report's OCR) shape punctuation and sentence boundaries.
Methods and data for the corpus as a whole.