Who Killed Sanmao and Virginia Woolf? A Comparative Study of Writers - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Who Killed Sanmao and Virginia Woolf?

A Comparative Study of Writers with Suicidal Attempt Based on A Quantitative Linguistic Method

Shucheng Zhu1, Xi Wang2, Pengyuan Liu1

1School of Information Science, Beijing Language and Culture University 2Faculty of Foreign Studies, Beijing Language and Culture University

Introduction & Related Works

01

Methodology

02

Analysis

03

Conclusion

04

CONTENTS

Introduction & Related Works PART 01

Introduction

On 14th October 2019, Sulli - a famous Korean superstar committed suicide in her

• wn house.

Sulli’s death Psychological dictionaries Computer technology Social media & suicide notes Detecting suicide ideation and attempt It is estimated that there are 16 million suicidal attempts each year, and approximately 8 million people died of suicide*. 16 million & 8 million Internal language pattern Different languages Quantitative Linguistics – A new method *World Health Organization: Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2020. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization (2013)

Related Works

• Literary scholars tend to consider a writer’s life as auxiliary materials in aid of textual interpretation and analysis.
• Few of whom attempts to analyze literary texts for a probe into their creator’s mental condition.
• Most of them apply Freudian psychoanalysis in their studies.

Literary

• Find the relation between features of writing style and writers with suicidal attempts.
• Psychological dictionary LIWC.
• Distinguish suicidal notes and ordinary works.
• Social media as microblog.
• Quantitative linguistic markers.

Linguistic features and computer technologies

Methodology PART 02

Materials

Virginia Woolf Sanmao

Research Questions

Five quantitative linguistic markers are employed in this paper to analyze and to answer the following three research questions:

• Can these markers be used in the analysis of writers of different languages?
• Can these markers reflect psychological activities of writers with suicidal attempt?
• What can we learn from these markers?

Markers

• Is a measure of a person’s ability to use vocabulary of a determined size.
• Reflects not only the person’s age and education background, but also his/her mood and psychological activities.
• People in a normal or joyful mood tend to have high richness than people with a bad mood.
• R4 is one of the many ways of calculating vocabulary richness of a text. The bigger it is, the more richness the text is.
• V is the total type of a text, N is the total token of a text, r is the rank and f(r) is the frequency in the rank-frequency

distribution of a text.

• Hapax Percentage is a simple ratio between the number of tokens and the number of hapax legomena in a text. Hapax

legomena are the words that occur only once in a text.

• NH is the number of hapax legomena in a text.

Richness

Markers

• Females prefer to use more personal pronouns and the more the pronouns they use, the more emotional the writers’ are.
• People with suicidal attempts use more personal pronouns in their social media.
• P is the total number of personal pronouns in a text.

Pronoun

• Refer to visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory and gustatory adjectives.
• Using less number and exclusivity of sensory adjectives can also be a signal of mental disease.
• 𝝌𝒋 is the number of the order i adjective in the text and 𝝒𝒋 is the value of exclusivity of the adjective, NK is the total

number of the sensory adjective list. Sensory Words

Markers

• Is an indicator that deals with a frequency structure of a text.
• Both reflects vocabulary richness and the relationship between the neighboring frequencies in a text.

Lambda

• Zipf’s exponent might be related to the language cognition and other aspects.
• Children’s language Zipf’s exponent is higher than the adults’.
• If the writer is in the good condition, the language Zipf’s exponent should be low. .
• 𝑄

" is the frequency of the word which rank is r. C and b are exponents.

Zipf’s Exponent

Analysis PART 03

Correlation Analysis

• Markers Richness, Sensory and Lambda have homogeneity which demonstrates that the higher the markers are, the better

mood and mental condition the writers are in.

• Markers Pronoun, Zipf’s Exponent has homogeneity which demonstrates that the higher the markers are, the worse mood

conditions the writers are in.

Markers Visualization

• For Sanmao’s works, the lowest value is about on S7, and in her last several works the values turn down.
• For Woolf’s works, the lowest values belong to V1, V2 and V8, and in her last 2 works, the values go up. Sensory is an

exception as in a way it predicts her worse mood and other markers show her sudden suicide because of the shock of war.

Markers Visualization

• For Sanmao’s works, the high value is S7 and the values of her last 2 works go up.
• For Virginia Woolf, the highest values are V1, V2, V5 and V8 and the values of her last two works go down.
• The mean of Zipf’s exponent can show that Zipf’s exponent can distinguish different languages.

Sequence Clustering

• V1, V2: Virginia Woolf’s earlier writings. As a novice in literature, Woolf suffered greatly from the pressure inflicted by

finishing the novels. So, her mood alternated between depression and euphoria.

• V3, V4, V5: These three books can be seen as Woolf’s best literary creation and this period is the primetime of her career

which endowed with personal matters.

• V6, V7: These two books are generally considered as the best of her later career.
• V8: As an anti-war outcry of Woolf, The Years is consuming for Woolf’s sensitive nerves, unstable mentality and vulnerable

physicality.

• V9: We can see a recovery tendency in the period between Woolf’s last two novels. However, the horrific and inexorable

war accelerated Woolf’s suicidal tendency. Virginia Woolf’s works

Sequence Clustering

• S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6: her early works and life in Sahara.
• S7: darkness of her life because of her beloved husband’s death.
• S8, S9, S10: she created these works while or after she travelled in Latin America and Europe.
• S11, S12: her last 2 works which indicates her suicide because her own bad mood.

Sanmao’s works

Conclusion PART 04

Conclusion

The result shows that all the markers we choose can reflect the writers’ psychological and mood activities both in English and Chinese. With the help of these markers, we may find out the psychological change of the writers who would never tell the public why they chose to commit suicide to end their lives.

We use five quantitative linguistic markers to analyze two female writers of different languages.

From these markers, we also find out the big event, such as mental disorder and the loss of spouse and war, would apparently influence one’s life.

Thanks