Variation of sentence length across time and genre

Rudnicka, Karolina

doi:10.1075/scl.85.10rud

Cited by 18 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Hence the rate of semantic shift of the words in our CDS n-grams and the CDS n-grams themselves could be among the lowest as well. Second, a trend toward shorter sentences (29) may provide alternative explanations of our observations, but although sentence length did decrease from 1890 to the 1920s in English, it has remained stable since (30). Furthermore, our analysis accounts for changes in sentence length by normalizing n-gram prevalence by the frequency of endof-sentence punctuation for that year (Materials and Methods, Time Series: Prevalence and Normalization).…”

Section: Robustness and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Bollen

Thij

Breithaupt

et al. 2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

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Section: Robustness and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Bollen

Thij

Breithaupt

et al. 2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Following previous work, we modelled entity representations using so-called (sentence) representation pooling for the top four layer [37,61] -which consists of averaging the chosen words in each sentence, and then averaging the vectors obtained for the individual sentences. In order to ensure that text portions were long enough to work well with XLM, which has been shown to work better with rather long passages [68], if a sentence were shorter than 20 words (the most common sentence length in English is between 10 and 30 words [69]) we would unite it with the following sentence; and so on until a passage of at least 20 words was created.…”

Section: Language Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Lexicon: using language models to encode memories of personally familiar and famous people and places in the brain

Bruera,

Poesio

2023

Preprint

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Knowledge about personally familiar people and places is extremely rich and varied, involving pieces of semantic information connected in unpredictable ways through past autobiographical memories. In this work we investigate whether we can capture brain processing of personally familiar people and places using subject-specific memories, after transforming them into vectorial semantic representations using language models. First we asked participants to provide us with the names of the closest people and places in their lives. Then we collected open-ended answers to a questionnaire, aimed at capturing various facets of declarative knowledge. We collected EEG data from the same participants while they were reading the names and subsequently mentally visualizing their referents. As a control set of stimuli, we also recorded evoked responses to a matched set of famous people and places. We then created original semantic representations for the individual entities using language models. For personally familiar entities, we used the text of the answers to the questionnaire. For famous entities, we employed their Wikipedia page, which reflects shared declarative knowledge about them. Through whole-scalp time-resolved and searchlight encoding analyses we found that we could capture how the brain processes one's closest people and places using person-specific answers to questionnaires, as well as famous entities. Encoding performance was significant in a large time window (200-800ms). In terms of spatio-temporal clusters, two main axes where encoding scores are significant emerged, in bilateral temporo-parietal electrodes first (200-500ms) and frontal and posterior central electrodes later (500-700ms). We also found that XLM, a contextualized language model or large language model, provided superior encoding scores when compared with a simpler static language model as word2vec. Overall, these results indicate that language models can capture subject-specific semantic representations as they are processed in the human brain, by exploiting small-scale distributional lexical data.

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“…Sentence length can be defined as the number of words that come between the opening word which starts with a capital letter and the end punctuation mark like: question mark, full stop, or exclamation mark 17) . Sentence length and complexity can reflect many merits about the character's personality (simple or complicated) in addition it may lead to the structure of action rising and falling 18) .…”

Section: Sentence Length and Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Glaspell and Childress used declaratives in their plays because the characters' speech contains mainly knowledge, opinions, facts and their point of view. Modality in the Verge focuses on prediction (7, 87%) as in Table (11) which is widely used by Claire throughout the play. Claire uses this technique of modality when she talks about her plants and to tell others about what will happen in the future.…”

Section: Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Feminism in Drama: Susan Glaspell and Alice Childress as a Case Study

ABDURRAHMAN,

HASAN,

HAZEM

2023

AJHS

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This study is a critical discourse analysis of two feminist plays: The Verge by Susan Glaspell (1921) and The Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White by Alice Childress (1966) dealing with the representation of feminism of the heroines of the two plays. Many studies have dealt with critical discourse analysis of feminism in different literary genres, however, plays have been given less attention in this respect. This study shows the role of feminism in two different societies; it also tries to highlight the problems that women face at the time of the World War I in America, the thoughts and beliefs that society has against women and how women fight to break these traditions throughout these selected plays. Accordingly, the study hypothesizes that society and social traditions have an important role in the lives of women in the sense that both black and white women face different kinds of oppression. The model adopted for analysis is Fairclough's model (1989) and the data are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively leading to the most important conclusions revealing that oppression is used against both black and white women and that women though of different societies face oppressions and undergo outdated social traditions; however, women differ in their way to break these traditions.

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Variation of sentence length across time and genre

Cited by 18 publications

References 16 publications

Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Family Lexicon: using language models to encode memories of personally familiar and famous people and places in the brain

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Feminism in Drama: Susan Glaspell and Alice Childress as a Case Study

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