Emotion and Modifier in Henry Rider Haggard’s Novels

Salim Sazzed


Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in employing quantitative methods to analyze literary texts, as they offer unique insights, theories, and interpretations. In light of this, the current study employs quantitative analysis to examine the fiction written by the renowned British adventure novelist, Sir Henry Rider Haggard. Specifically, the study aims to investigate the affective content and prevalence of distinctive linguistic features in six of Haggard’s most distinguished works. We evaluate dominant emotional states at the sentence level as well as investigate the deployment of specific linguistic features such as modifiers and deontic modals, and collocated terms. Through sentence-level emotion analysis the findings reveal a notable prevalence of “joy”-related emotions across the novels. Furthermore, the study observes that intensifiers are employed more commonly than the mitigators as modifiers and the collocated terms of modifiers exhibit high similarity across the novels. By integrating quantitative analyses with qualitative assessments, this study presents a novel perspective on the patterns of emotion and specialized grammatical features in some of Haggard’s most celebrated literary works.
Anthology ID:
2023.wnu-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Nader Akoury, Elizabeth Clark, Mohit Iyyer, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Faeze Brahman, Khyathi Chandu
Venue:
WNU
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–15
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wnu-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wnu-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Salim Sazzed. 2023. Emotion and Modifier in Henry Rider Haggard’s Novels. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Narrative Understanding, pages 11–15, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotion and Modifier in Henry Rider Haggard’s Novels (Sazzed, WNU 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wnu-1.2.pdf