Good nouns, bad nouns: what the corpus says and what native speakers think

Publisher： Rodopi

ISSN： 0921-5034

Source： Language and Computers, Vol.71, Iss.1, 2009-11, pp. : 103-117

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Abstract

Many researchers have found that some words or constructions tend to co-occur with words representing a positive or negative semantic nuance, demonstrating that these words have a certain semantic preference (e.g., the negative preference of cause in Stubbs, 1995). Other researchers have explored the negative or positive associations of words taken out of context, their semantic orientation (Osgood et al., 1957; Turney and Littman, 2003). In this paper, we investigate how well a word's semantic orientation correlates with its semantic preference. We use the quantitative method developed by Dilts and Newman (2006) to measure how strongly a large number of nouns in the British National Corpus prefer to collocate with positive or negative orientation adjectives. We then compare each noun's semantic preference to its rating for 'pleasure' from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) (Bradley and Lang, 1999), an established psychological measure of a word's semantic orientation. We find a surprisingly large number of nouns with negative semantic orientation but positive semantic preference: that is, 'bad' nouns preferring to collocate with 'good' adjectives. By contrast, only a small number of 'good' nouns attracted more 'bad' adjectives. Our results suggest an interesting mismatch in the way nouns are modified: while 'good' nouns attract primarily positive adjectives (further reinforcing their semantic orientation), 'bad' nouns attract both negative (reinforcing) and positive (qualifying) adjectives that have a greater transformative effect on the semantics of the noun.