Language of lovers

In class we talked about relationships and we learned some phrasal verbs related to them. By sheer coincidence, I bumped into this blog entry and I just found it curious. Mysteries of the language...

“I love you,” she says.
“I love you more,” he replies.
“I love you most,” comes her response.
“I love you the mostest,” he answers, somewhat ungrammatically.

And they carry on like this for a further twenty minutes (with the occasional break for some snogging) as the rest of the people in the train carriage shuffle their newspapers, cough with embarrassment or turn up their mp3 players to drown out the horror of young love.


The language of lovers is something that we’ve probably all experienced or been subjected to at some point in our lives, and it’s a mixture of pet names, hushed tones and – according to new research from the University of Texas – similar words and grammatical patterns.


According to James Pennebaker, Molly Ireland and their team of psychologists, we’re not just likely to match our speech to the one we love, but we’re also more likely to be attracted to people with similar speech styles. In their most recent study they set up speed dates between pairs of students and found when the conversations were analysed, that while the topics discussed were predictably very similar, the grammatical details held small clues as to which couples would hit it off.


Using text analysis, they found that the pairs whose language styles matched most closely were much more likely to express an interest in seeing the other person again. What was also interesting here was... GO ON READING

(from Macmillandictionaryblog.com)