Character Analysis
Character analysis involves examining the traits, motivations, and behaviors of characters in literature or other forms of storytelling. This process often includes studying their relationships with other characters and their development throughout the narrative. By analyzing characters, linguists can gain insights into the ways in which language is used to convey personality, emotions, and social dynamics within a text.
3 Key excerpts on "Character Analysis"
- (Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
...The comprehensive analysis of language includes quantifying both a person’s language style in addition to their language content. Language content represents the “what” of a language and primarily consists of semantically‐laden words (e.g. emotion words, social words). Language style primarily consists of function (i.e. syntactical) words (e.g. prepositions, conjunctions). Language content typically include words classified as nouns, regular verbs, and most adjectives and adverbs – words that generally have meaning even without context, such as “happiness” or “family.” Function words primarily include pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs, among other classes of linguistic particles – words that do not possess inherent meaning without context, such as “of” and “the.” Function and content words often show different personality correlates. Content words most commonly exhibit statistical relationships to explicitly‐accessible self‐information, such as sociability and trait affect, whereas function words are typically predictive of lower‐level personality processes, including things like automatic cognitive and attentional processes. Language Analysis Methods and Techniques Qualitative Methods Language analysis in psychology dates back to the early beginnings of modern psychology. The earliest research methods of psychological language analysis were qualitative methods. Early work on language and personality principally consisted of case studies that emphasized the deep interpretation and discovery of hidden meanings in a person’s language...
eBook - ePubRoutledge Revivals: Essays on Style and Language (1966)
Linguistic and Critical Approaches to Literary Style
- Roger Fowler, Roger Fowler(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Linguistic Theory and the Study of Literature IN THIS CENTURY, students of language and literature have witnessed the development of a new discipline, linguistics, to a state of relative maturity. The development has been marked by a progressive growth in the number of books and persons attached to the subject, and so it is ceasing to be something rather esoteric, and is finding a place among the established humanities. Unfortunately, one feels that the integration of linguistics with its natural companion, literary criticism, has been hindered by something unsympathetic in the way the linguist has presented himself. The image is sometimes an unhappy one: pretension of scientific accuracy; obsession with an extensive, cumbersome and recondite terminology; display of analytic techniques; scorn of all that is subjective, impressionistic, mentalistic—in a word, ‘prelinguistic’. But this view of the linguist—armed to the teeth and potentially destructive by his attack on a sensitive work of art—cannot be substantiated: it rarely has any factual basis in the actual practices and interests of linguists. Just as there is no single thing ‘literary criticism’ which produces a ‘critic’ who can be identified by reference to his methods and beliefs, so linguistics as a homogeneous, evangelical, operative-producing subject does not exist. We cannot altogether predict a linguist’s attitude to his analysis of a text. There is no one linguistic method with easily characterizable modes of operation and endproducts. Certain fundamentals are common to all who call themselves linguists: the beliefs that language changes, is patterned, is only conventionally connected with the outside world, and has an analysable form, for example. But when we look closer we find fewer agreements on details. The history of linguistics reveals tentative effort, revisions of opinion, lack of universal continuous progress...
eBook - ePubThe Languages of Literature
Some Linguistic Contributions to Criticism
- Roger Fowler(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Briefly, this means that, in the first case, although literature is language and therefore open to ordinary formal linguistic investigation (as I argued in Essays on Style and Language, 10–11) it has, like other formally distinctive texts, essentially distinctive contexts which the linguist no less than the critic must study. That is, the investigator must be curious about the extra-linguistic features which condition the distinctive style of a literary work. As for the applicability of different linguistic models, this is obviously variable. The old Bloomfieldian linguistics in its classic Immediate Constituent analysis phase, or Hallidayan scale-and-category grammar, both concentrating on relatively ‘small’ units, can have little to say about the linguistic structure of extended texts. Nor can we expect to learn much through linguistics about kinds of poetry where metaphor is dominant until we have proper tools for lexical analysis. It apparently needs repeating over and over again that there is no one linguistics providing a ready-made set of procedures or formulae perfectly apt for all kinds of texts. The appropriateness of the model is a concern for the individual analyst; just as important for this general discussion is that all those who engage in it realize that bland undefined accounts of ‘linguistics’ lead nowhere. There is no one linguistics except in community of certain basic and general ideals held since Saussure’s time. We cannot switch on a standardized linguistic analysis machine and stand by while it puts out a definitive breakdown of a text. Doubtless the lack of such a de vice has its advantages. My third prescription for a successful linguistic criticism is that it should proceed not merely from a theory of language but also from a respectful consideration of the demands and peculiarities of the many kinds of literary study. Now, the substance of this remark is addressed not only to linguists...
