A Computer Program for the Objective Analysis of Style and Emotional Connotations of Prose: Hemingway, Galsworthy, and Faulkner Compared

Abstract

An SPSSX computer program was used to score 48 100-word text passages from novels written by Ernest Hemingway, John Galsworthy, and William Faulkner. The program, called TEXT.NLZ, produced more than 50 objective measures of each passage, including several measures of punctuation, word frequency, and emotionality. Passages written by the three authors were easily discriminable in terms of objective measures, and differences among authors with respect to the objective measures accurately reflected the content of subjective critical comments describing the work of each author.

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

“…Pragmatically speaking, this would mean that it is sufficient to put words with specific affective connotations together to create half of the affective impact a poem is able to provoke in the reader. Again, while this view may appear extremely minimalistic, it is well in line with other findings from reading studies using normal sentences or passages from novels (Anderson and McMaster, 1982; Whissell et al, 1986; Bestgen, 1994; Whissell, 1994; Hsu et al, 2015a). …”

“…Lexical affective meaning has been shown to be of reliable predictive potential for the affective perception of different types of texts (Anderson and McMaster, 1982; Whissell et al, 1986; Bestgen, 1994; Whissell, 1994; Hsu et al, 2015a). The importance of lexical affective meaning is increasingly stressed in sentiment analyses of online social media texts (Thelwall et al, 2010; Paltoglou, 2014).…”

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

“…If this null-model of supralexical affective meaning were correct, a simple declarative sentence containing a positive noun and a negative adjective like “ The mother is bad ” should – on average – be evaluated as neutral. As counter-intuitive as this may sound, the seminal studies in emotional stylometry by Bestgen (1994) and Whissell (1994) both demonstrated that the valence of supralexical units (sentences, texts) could be predicted – to a considerable extent – as a function of the valence of their component words. Correlating the valence ratings for words and sentences taken from four different texts ( The Little Match Girl by Andersen, He Belonged to Me, Said the Sea by Cesbron, The Seven Ravens by the brothers Grimm, and The Stroll by de Maupassant), Bestgen (1994; Table 2) showed that word valence accounted for 30–60% of sentence valence, depending on the text.…”

Service Encounters as a Sequence of Events

“…This dictionary has been used in several instances (i.e., the emotional analysis of novels). For more information on this dictionary, we refer to publications by Cynthia Whissel (e.g., Sweeney and Whissel 1984;Whissel 1994). The only subjective part of our utility assessment of the episodes in the telephone conversations that we studied is the selection of words.…”