Personal style is an extraordinary thing that exhibits itself in a great variety of ways besides writing. Considered as expression, it begins with the infant's first cry, identifying itself as a new and particular individual and distinguishing itself, at least to its mother and close family, from all other newly-born infants – an act both of self-expression and self-definition! The new individualist linguistics of Barbara Johnstone holds language to be ‘just as crucially self-expressive as it is referential or relationship-affirming, poetic or rhetorical’:

The difficulty for attribution studies lies in finding a way to conceptualise this linguistic individuation in such a way that it can be directly modelled and tested.

From the complementary viewpoint of recognition, a sense of individuality derives from the same infant's urgent need to distinguish the mother from other women, family members from others of the community, and members of the community from strangers.