Positivity of the English language

Autor: Kloumann, Isabel M., Danforth, Christopher M., Harris, Kameron Decker, Bliss, Catherine A., Dodds, Peter Sheridan
Rok vydání: 2011
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 7, e29484, 2012
Druh dokumentu: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029484
Popis: Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.
Comment: Manuscript: 9 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures; Supplementary Information: 12 pages, 3 tables, 8 figures
Databáze: arXiv