If you wonder why you’ve never seen the word “allness” in your dictionary, it’s because this word has eluded lexicographers — so far at least. I first saw it used by the psychologist Charles Osgood in his chapter about style in Thomas Sebeok’s 1960 book,
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If you wonder why you’ve never seen the word “allness” in your dictionary, it’s because this word has eluded lexicographers — so far at least. I first saw it used by the psychologist Charles Osgood in his chapter about style in Thomas Sebeok’s 1960 book, Style in Language. Osgood defined “style” as “an individual’s deviation from the norms for the situations in which he is encoding, these deviations being in the statistical properties of those structured features for which there exists some degree of choice in his code.” He called one of these deviations from the norm allness terms.
In this chapter Osgood compared 100 authentic suicide notes with 100 letters written by friends and relatives, wanting to learn whether the suicide notes revealed a higher degree of motivation and emotional drive than the friendly letters. One of the measures Osgood used to identify strong emotional drive was the presence of allness terms (ungraded uses of words like always, all, never, every, everything, nothing, etc.). He found them common in the suicide messages and considerably less so in the letters to friends and relatives.
I tucked this into my memory, and a few years later it occurred to me that Osgood’s allness terms might be a useful way to measure a writer’s individual, unconscious style that forensic linguists might use when comparing an anonymous writer’s message with comparable texts produced by other suspected writers, along with other language features such as grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation.
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One problem with this idea is that there are times when allness terms are appropriate, such as “I’ve never seen an extraterrestrial” or “You should always lock the door” which, for different reasons, don’t indicate the high degree of strong emotional drive that Osgood connected with suicide notes. But I found that some people use allness terms more frequently than others and that their frequency of occurrence can be one of the unconsciously used language features which, when considered together with other features, can sometimes help distinguish between the styles of different writers.
But that’s not all. Since Osgood found that allness terms found in genuine suicide notes conveyed a higher degree of serious motivation and emotional drive, there is reason to believe that his finding could also help determine the seriousness of anonymous messages. It is natural for receivers of such letters and notes to fear danger of some kind. But some anonymous messages merely make complaints or give unwanted advice. Others express the unrequited love of secret admirers. The most troublesome anonymous messages contain serious threats and hatred for which receivers have very good reason to be afraid. Osgood’s finding that allness terms can convey strong emotional drive should be helpful in determining how seriously receivers of anonymous threats should fear the worst. Following Osgood’s lead, the more allness terms are used, the more serious the motivation will be in the threat. For example, the allness terms in “I’m always watching you everywhere you go and I’ll never stop” offer a stronger degree of emotional seriousness than “someone is watching you,” even though both versions can be frightening.
In recent years, cognitive therapists have identified this language feature as “all or nothing thinking,” a cognitive distortion in a client’s perception of a situation. Writing teachers might call it “overgeneralizing.” But since linguists study how language is used rather than underlying cognitive distortions or problems in the writing process, “allness terms” seems like a useful label to have around. But whatever name we have for it, we have to thank Charles Osgood who almost 60 years ago clued us in to it as a feature of a writer’s style. I’m waiting for dictionaries to include it.
Roger Shuy is a professor emeritus of linguistics at Georgetown University, where he created and led its doctoral program in sociolinguistics.