The present study demonstrates the separation of affective and denotative meaning systems in the semantic space by a new factor analytic technique. The data used were collected in Brazil and Hungary following standard pan‐cultural procedures (Osgood et al., 1975) for semantic differential ratings on 100 heterogeneous concepts against 60 indigenous scales elicited from teen‐age males in the respective language/culture communities. Results from both cultures provided evidence for dominance of affective Evaluation, Potency and Activity (E, P, A) in the indigenous factor structures. The dimensions in the “other” (Denotation) space, orthogonal to Affect, are also clearly interpretable affect‐free semantic features of concepts. The simultaneous salience of these two semantic systems for most scales highlights the importance of cultural meanings of scales for each indigenous culture under study.
A strategy for reordering the hierarchical tree structure is presented. While the order of terminal nodes of Johnson's (1967) procedure is arbitrary, depending simply upon the order of input data, the present procedure will rearrange every triad of nodes under a common least upper node at all levels so that the node in the middle is always non-arbitrarily closest to the anchored node. Solutions for data from Miller and Nicely (1955) by Johnson and two rotational schemes are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.