Positivity of the English language |
| |
Authors: | Kloumann Isabel M Danforth Christopher M Harris Kameron Decker Bliss Catherine A Dodds Peter Sheridan |
| |
Institution: | Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America. |
| |
Abstract: | 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. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 PubMed 等数据库收录! |
|