Tracing the scope of fear in corpus: similarities and differences in cross-domain/genre texts

Abstract

Even if to mainstream psychologists fear is one of the seven universal emotions, discrete, measurable and with clearly distinct features, in the humanities we consider fear as a widespread concept we associate with more complex prompts than the physiological response to a hazard. This research explores various ways we describe FEAR in Spanish. For this we have made use of digital humanities tools and methods, mainly corpus linguistics and natural language processing, which enable us to explore, present and visualize linguistic elements that define fear in Mexican society. Thus we have explored this emotion (and its family: anxiety, horror, apprehension, dread, panic, terror) by examining the way it is verbalized in an ad hoc corpus covering four genres/domains: chronicle, essay, the press, and social media, specifically, tweets. A set of semantic similarity and ranking metrics were applied to the texts to identify each genre’s characteristics in association with fear. The results show that fear is an emotion that, even if it differs depending on the genre, responds to the prompts of a modern society in which danger is still being represented by illness, violence, power, or an out-group.