Extracting Semantic Field of Joy and Sadness from the Movies Corpus: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This study extracts the semantic field of joy and sadness from Movies Corpus focusing on the development of the trends and options to express the two moods of joy and sadness. Plutchik’s Theory of Basic Emotions has been applied to extract the frequency of both emotions. Oxford Thesaurus and the corpus-lingual database of Movies Corpus have been used to generate data. From 200 million words of Movies Corpus, the two most occurring emotions have been scrutinized under synthesising inspections. The frequency, semantic drifts and linguistic variations for these two moods have been scrutinized under careful observation and calculation. Major findings reveal that the words ‘pleasure, treat, joy and prize’ are the most occurring options for happiness with the highest frequencies while the words ‘grief, depression, misery and sadness’ are the most suitable options for depicting the sad mood with the highest frequencies.