A frequency analysis of emotive words suggests 'Britain's stiff upper lip is real-- at least in literature'. While the study shows an overall decline in the use of emotive words over the course of the 20thc., American lit has seen an increase, compared to England's decrease, in recent decades.
The authors raise the question: does mood-word frequency in literature-- for example, the increase in 'fear-words' since 1970-- actually express a cultural mood that tracks with other media, or does literature tend to express emotions which are being suppressed at the time?
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As a matter of fact, King's work was mentioned somewhat facetiously as a possible 'reason'-- it would be amazing if one little author could cause a bump in fear-words in American lit. But the question would be: does the rise in fear-words appearing in lit mean that scary lit took off because there was an underlying mood of fear in the public that was not being openly expressed?
All pretty airy-fairy for a scientific study IMHO. & how did they decide what was 'literature'? (Stephen King??)
Posts: 2605 | Location: As they say at 101.5FM: Not New York... Not Philadelphia... PROUD TO BE NEW JERSEY!
What books did they compare? Les Miserables vs War and Peace or The Naked and the Dead? Little Women vs Fifty Shades of Grey? Emily Dickinson vs Ezra Pound? The Bible vs Curious George?
Very interesting, Bethree. Proof, the study cited said:
quote:
Here we analyze trends in the past century of mood words in books, using Google’s Ngram database. Google’s Ngram database represents a 4% digitally–scanned sample of several centuries of books, for a total of 5,195,769 volumes [2]. The corpus contains texts in different languages, and, for English, a further distinctions is made between American English and British English (according to the country of publication, i.e. United States versus Great Britain). Additionally, a subset of English texts collects only fiction books. Titles of books present in the corpus are not available because of copyright reasons [2]. The corpus gives information on how many times, in a given year, an 1-gram or an n-gram is used, where an 1-gram is a string of characters uninterrupted by space(i.e. a word, but also numbers, typos, etc.) and an n-gram is a sequence of n 1-grams.
So, titles are not available.
I am thinking it's a choice of words and not the actual emotional state.
The fact that only volumes which were out of copyright were viewed also skews the sample toward titles written earlier than the beginning (in some cases, early) of the 20th century.
