Diction 5.0 General Inquirer

1. Diction 5.0 General Inquirer E.B. & E.N. Cleveland State University

2. Diction Software • Originally created for the study of political discourse, expanded to 36 categories of communications. • Searches the text word frequency of 10,000 words in 31 word list dictionaries • Creates scores for the 31 dictionaries and 9 computed variables. • Analyzes in 500 word units

3. Diction Dictionaries -31 Categories -Size ranges from 10 – 745 words • No words duplicated across dictionaries • Ability to create custom dictionaries • Maximum of ten • Maximum of 200 words per dictionary

4. Sample Dictionary Dictionary: Leveling -Contains words used to ignore individual differences and to build a sense of completeness and assurance. (Examples: Everybody, anyone, each, fully, always, completely, inevitable, consistent, unconditional, consummate, absolute, open-and-shut)

5. What does a score mean? • A normative range derived from 20,000+ texts analyzed by Diction • 36 distinct text types - Normal range equals the -1/+1 standard deviation from the mean (68%)

6. Sample Results

7. Five Semantic Variables Based on Dictionary Formulas - ACTIVITY = +(Praise + Satisfaction + Inspiration) – (Blame + Hardship + Denial) OPTIMISM = +(Praise + Satisfaction + Inspiration) – (Blame + Hardship + Denial) CERTAINTY = +(Tenacity + Leveling + Collectives + Insistence) – (Numerical Terms + Ambivalence + Self-Reference + Variety) REALISM = +(Familiarity + Spatial Awareness + Temporal Awareness + Present Concern + Human Interest + Concreteness) – (Past Concern + Complexity) COMMONALITY = +(Centrality+ Cooperation + Rapport) – (Diversity + Exclusion + Liberation)

8. Calculated Variables Insistence Score • Words repeated three or more times in a 500 word text Embellishment • Ratio of descriptive words to functional words Variety • Measure of linguistic dispersion Complexity - Measure of word size

9. SampleResults

10. Political Speech ExampleOut of range scores highlighted

11. Political Speech Example

12. Convocation AddressesDr. Michael Schwartz President, Cleveland State University

13. Limitations • Samples of less than 350 words handled by extrapolation and standardization to a 500 word basis • Wide variance in sample size (n) of the 36 communication types • Out of range not referenced to 2nd or 3rd deviation

14. General Inquirer • Standard dictionaries (“custom” allowed) • Descriptive (f and %) • “Harvard-IV-4” and “Lasswell” general-purpose dictionaries; 182 tag categories • Harvard: objects, animals, people, institutions, relationships, etc. • Lasswell: Dynamics of Culture (power, respect, skill, enlightenment, wealth, etc)

15. Basically… • Put text file in a folder, name it “testdir” • Testdir must be in the same folder as General Inquirer (in Program Files) • Can run multiple files within testdir • Output opened in Excel can be transferred to SPSS

16. Info http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~inquirer/

18. Selected Texts 32 University Presidents’ speeches on university websites One speech form each institution Converted into text files All saved in testdir folder Used the standard dictionary

20. Selected Categories • Harvard: Pleasur, Ovrst, Academ, Econ@, Exprsv, COLL, SocRel, Race, Kin@, EMOT, Place, Object, Self, Our, You, Name • Lasswell: PowGain, RcEthic, AffTot, WltTot, WlbGain, EnlGain

21. “SocRel”

23. Validity: All Correlations

24. Validity: Group Correlations

25. “SocRel” in “Enlightenment Gain”

26. “SocRel” in “Power Gain”