LINGUIST List 17.2734

Mon Sep 25 2006

Sum: English Affect Word-List

Editor for this issue: Kevin Burrows <kevinlinguistlist.org>

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Directory         1.    Brian Murphy, English Affect Word-List

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Message 1: English Affect Word-List
Date: 19-Sep-2006
From: Brian Murphy <brian.murphycs.tcd.ie>
Subject: English Affect Word-List


Query for this summary posted in LINGUIST Issue: 17.2582 Regarding Query: http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-2582.html#1

First of all, thanks to all that contributed: Maite Taboada, Aubrey Nunes,Nora Wiedenmann, Elena Bashir and Cynthia Girand.

Aubrey Nunes and Nora Wiedenmann pointed out phonological patterns inEnglish (e.g. shlep, slink) and German (e.g. Schlampe, Klampfe) thatcorrelate with negative connotations.

Maite Taboada pointed me to an online discussion group on the computationaltreatment of sentiment/affect(http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SentimentAI/), which hosts severalhand-crafted lists, including her own, based on Martin and White's (2005)Appraisal framework (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SentimentAI/).

Cynthia Girand directed me Cynthia Whissel's Dictionary of Affect(Laurentian University). This is the most comprehensive resource I havefound with more than 8000 English words. Each word has been experimentallyexamined, and carries an average value for elicited human judgements ofpleasantness, activation and imagery. The dictionary is freely availablefor non-commercial academic purposes.

Incidentally, I didn't make my purposes clear in the initial posting. I aminterested in argument structure realisation, and the fact that somepatterns involve advantage (e.g. beneficial ''for'' in English) ordisadvantage (e.g. the Chinese bei construction) to an event participant. Iam trying to establish the strength of these effects from corpus data.

Thanks again,

Brian MurphyTrinity College Dublin Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science                             Computational Linguistics                             Lexicography                             Psycholinguistics                             Semantics