Related papers: Positivity of the English language
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
Prior work has revealed that positive words occur more frequently than negative words in human expressions, which is typically attributed to positivity bias, a tendency for people to report positive views of reality. But what about the…
Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…
We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length \cite{Zipf1935} and the average information content \cite{Piantadosi2011}, but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Speakers of all human languages make use of grammatical devices to express attributional qualities, feelings, and opinions as well as to provide meta-commentary on topics in discourse. In general, linguists refer to this category as…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
The purpose of this study is to find evidence for supporting the hypothesis that language is the mirror of our thinking, our prejudices and cultural stereotypes. In this analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 537 people. The answers…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
We describe a novel language-independent approach to the task of determining the polarity, positive or negative, of the author's opinion on a specific topic in natural language text. In particular, weights are assigned to attributes,…
Language is a popular resource to mine speakers' attitude bias, supposing that speakers' statements represent their bias on concepts. However, psychology studies show that people's explicit bias in statements can be different from their…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
Anxiety, the anticipatory unease about a potential negative outcome, is a common and beneficial human emotion. However, there is still much that is not known, such as how anxiety relates to our body and how it manifests in language. This is…
Understanding how the brain represents the multifaceted properties of words in context is essential for explaining the neural architecture of human language. Here, we combine large-scale psycholinguistic modeling with naturalistic fMRI to…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…