How anger rose: Hypothesis testing in diachronic semantics

Abstract

On the basis of a large database of attested examples of anger, ire and wrath in Middle English texts, we perform a statistical analysis of the factors contributing to the emergence of anger as the dominant term. Specifically, we perform a logistic regression to test the hypothesis formulated by Diller (1994), who suggests that anger was introduced in the lexical field of anger expressions because social changes gave rise to new forms of anger: in contrast with the traditional reference to anger, in which the angry person has a high social rank and typically reacts in a violent way, anger expressed the emotions of lower-ranked persons, who react less violently. Overall, our statistical analysis is consonant with Diller's hypothesis, but it appears, importantly, that the hypothesis needs to be lectally enriched by means of a reference to the text type in which anger appears.