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Implicit in your second paragraph are the notions of absolute status and of mutual recognition of absolute status.

I'd suggest social status is always relative and is likely assumed by participants prior to their initiating an interaction: The student used lower status language when writing to the professor, who used lower status language when writing to the famous professor.

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I'm saying the same thing you said. The hypothesis in the comment I was replying to is that speaking with fewer of the noted words is a skilled learned as part of reaching higher status, presumably because speaking that way allows you to better wield your station.

That isn't shown in the evidence, because the evidence in the article shows that the speech used is indeed relative.

Not necessarily. It has little to do with learning to speak in a higher status manner. The comment box doesn't allow for a clear concise explanation but the language shift is something that the brain does on a subconscious level. A person's emotional state is related to how they see themselves in relation to their world at that moment. The 'language shift' is a manifestation of that. It is a tell in a way, the same way different clusters of body movements are, unlike body language, though, it is something that goes undetected by either party and hence can't be actively expressed or detected. That's why the LWC software was built. Check out the book that Pennebaker wrote. It does a better job explaining this than the article does and it will clear any confusion. Pennebaker doesn't provide an explanation for why their's a need to be more personal when assuming a lower status or when experiencing emotional trauma but he does provide plenty of evidence for the relationship.

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