A metalanguage analysis of counselor and client verb usage in counseling.

Examined the verb type and noun case role usages of a counselor and client from the 1st, 11th, and 25th interviews in a single counseling case, using the rationale from a computer-assisted language analysis system and a case grammar approach. The analysis indicated that the participants were remarkably similar in the frequency with which they used (a) specific verb types and (b) case roles of particular noun phrases within each interview. Moreover, Ss were similar in their changes to higher or lower frequencies of these units of linguistic structure over the 3 interviews. The counselor and client appear to be "tracking" each other in their use of given verb types as methods for relating named things to each other. In the beginning of the series, the majority of verbs that both participants used identified the client member of the pair as the agent of some action. By the end of the series, a majority of verbs that both participants were using identified the client as the object of some inner state, or as the experiencer of a psychological process of feeling, sensing, or knowing. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)