Semantics

Folk aesthetics in the Russian linguistic worldview

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Zwei russische schoenheiten

Folk aesthetics is an area that has attracted limited scholarly attention. By folk aesthetics I understand the conceptualisation of aesthetics embedded in language and shared by speakers of that language (cf. Apresjan 1992). Aesthetics reflects norms about what is ‘beautiful’ and applies to numerous aspects of life – what people see, do, how they move, speak, what they eat. Overall, aesthetics is about identifying pleasing aspects of living.

The ideals of aesthetics vary from culture to culture, from epoch from epoch and from language to language. People with an interest in history might be aware that the ideals of beauty have changed across time and countries. Yet the knowledge about variation in language regarding the ideals of ‘beauty’ are not … ↪

”I read your Facebook post and (I think) I know who you are”, part 2: A mini-experiment on author psychology assessment

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minieksp

In part 1 on this blog, “A mini-history of author analysis”, I pointed out that attempting to draw conclusions about the author of a text based on traits of the text alone has a long tradition in forensics (identifying perpetrators or revealing forgeries), literary studies (authorship identification) and psychology (from psychoanalysis to modern customer/consumer behavior studies). In its modern, machine learning version, psychological author profiling is often based on the ”Big Five” model (see figure 1) going back to McCrae & Costa 1989.

Billede2

But how do human readers decode and interpret concrete features of text as to its authors personality?

In order to find preliminary answers to this question, I performed a mini-experiment in my lesson on “Communicative … ↪

”I read your Facebook post and (I think) I know who you are”, part 1: A mini-history of author analysis

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Billede1

Attempting to draw conclusions about the author of a text based on traits of the text alone has a long tradition. It has been a topic of interest in forensics (identifying perpetrators or revealing forgeries), literary studies (authorship identification) and psychology (from psychoanalysis to modern customer/consumer behavior studies). In 15th Century Italy, Lorenzo Valla proved the forgery of the Donation of Constantine based on anachronistic word choice (8th, and not 4th, century A.D.) and poor grammar. Contending the authorship of certain texts previously attributed to Shakespeare goes back to the end of the 17th Century and builds on the philological methods stemming from biblical and classic studies, developed in the Renaissance period, analyzing language style (word choice and grammar). In … ↪