Tracking diachronic sentiment change of economic terms in times of crisis: Connotative fluctuations of ‘inflation’ in the news discourse

The present study focuses on the fluctuation of sentiment in economic terminology to observe semantic changes in restricted diachrony. Our study examines the evolution of the target term ‘inflation’ in the business section of quality news and the impact of the Great Recession. This is carried out th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 18; no. 11; p. e0287688
Main Authors Fernández-Cruz, Javier, Moreno-Ortiz, Antonio
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Francisco Public Library of Science 02.11.2023
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
19th century
Analysis
Biology and Life Sciences
Central banks
Computational linguistics
Consumption
Data mining
Deflation
Diachronic analysis
Economic aspects
Economic conditions
Economic growth
Economics
Eurozone
Evaluation
Inflation
Inflation (Finance)
Influence
Journalists
Language
Language processing
Linguistics
Macroeconomics
Natural language interfaces
News
Qualitative analysis
Recessions
Research and Analysis Methods
Semantics
Sentiment analysis
Social networks
Social Sciences
Sovereign debt
Spain
Statistical analysis
Terminology
Trends
United Kingdom
Watergate affair
Words (language)
Spain
United Kingdom
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI10.1371/journal.pone.0287688

Cover

More Information
Summary:The present study focuses on the fluctuation of sentiment in economic terminology to observe semantic changes in restricted diachrony. Our study examines the evolution of the target term ‘inflation’ in the business section of quality news and the impact of the Great Recession. This is carried out through the application of quantitative and qualitative methods: Sentiment Analysis, Usage Fluctuation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis. From the diachronic Great Recession News Corpus that covers the 2007–2015 period, we extracted sentences containing the term ‘inflation’. Several facts are evidenced: (i) terms become event words given the increase in their frequency of use due to the unfolding of relevant crisis events, and (ii) there are statistically significant culturally motivated changes in the form of emergent collocations with sentiment-laden words with a lower level of domain-specificity.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0287688