"Positivity of the English language" by Isabel M. Kloumann, Christopher M. Danforth et al.

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Title

Authors

Isabel M. Kloumann, University of Vermont
Christopher M. Danforth, University of Vermont
Kameron Decker Harris, University of Vermont
Catherine A. Bliss, University of Vermont
Peter Sheridan Dodds, University of Vermont

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-11-2012

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. © 2012 Kloumann et al.