Formality of Language: definition, measurement and behavioral determinants

Abstract

. A new concept of formality of linguistic expressions is introduced and argued to be the most important dimension of variation between styles or registers. Formality is subdivided into "deep" formality and "surface" formality. Deep formality is defined as avoidance of ambiguity by minimizing the context-dependence and fuzziness of expressions. This is achieved by explicit and precise description of the elements of the context needed to disambiguate the expression. A formal style is characterized by detachment, accuracy, rigidity and heaviness; an informal style is more flexible, direct, implicit, and involved, but less informative. An empirical measure of formality, the F-score, is proposed, based on the frequencies of different word classes in the corpus. Nouns, adjectives, articles and prepositions are more frequent in formal styles; pronouns, adverbs, verbs and interjections are more frequent in informal styles. It is shown that this measure, though coarse-grained, adequately disti...