Towards Positivity:A Large-Scale Diachronic Sentiment Analysis of the Humanities and Social Sciences in China

作     者：Wei Xiao Yuxin Guo Xi Zhao 

作者机构：School of Foreign Languages and CulturesChongqing UniversityChongqingChina Research Center for LanguageCognition and Language ApplicationChongqing UniversityChongqingChina 

出 版 物：《Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences》 (复旦人文社会科学论丛（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2023年第16卷第4期

页      面：569-589页

学科分类：0303[法学-社会学] 0502[文学-外国语言文学] 050201[文学-英语语言文学] 05[文学] 

基　　金：supported by the Social Science Foundation of Chongqing[Grant Number 2019QNYY51] the Science Foundation of Chongqing[Grant Number cstc2020jcyj-msxmX0554] the Fund of the Interdisciplinary Supervisor Team for Graduates Programs of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission[Grant Number YDSTD1923] the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities[Grant Number 2021CDJSKZX07] the Graduate Research Innovation Program of Chongqing[Grant Number CYS22081]. 

主　　题：China Humanities and social sciences Academic writing Linguistic positivity bias Sentiment analysis 

摘      要：With its rising number of publications and expanding international collaborations,China s humanities and social sciences(HSS)research is displaying its potential for global prominence.Researchers have been exploring the development of China s HSS from different perspectives.However,the examinations from the perspective of sentiment analysis are scanty.Our aim is then to examine the sentiment features in Chinese HSS academic writing,by analyzing a large-scale corpus with over 275 million characters and with a time span from 2000 to 2020.Considering that most studies only focused on abstracts,we examined both the abstracts and the full texts,as well as a direct comparison between them.We found that Chinese HSS academic writing has evolved to be more positively biased in the past two decades,showing an upward trend in the use of positive words and a slight downward trend in the use of negative words.However,the upward trend of positive words in the full texts is not that clear,resembling a fluctuating pattern.Regarding the comparison,the abstracts are more likely to use positive words while the full texts tend to use more negative words.These phenomena can be explained with the social cognitive theory,in that they may be shaped by a joint force of the nature of human beings,the nature of language,the particular socio-cultural background in China and the features of the academic genre.