Billy's post on the controversial 'good service' reminded me of a paper I came across a while ago. It's entitled Words with Attitude and it's an interesting research of evaluative expressions, starting with adjectives such as 'good' or 'bad' and working their way up to larger units like phrases and paragraphs, using the WordNet lexical database. The main objective of the research is to design an automatic algorithm for measuring the subjective meaning expressed in a text, which can then help in the classification of documents on subjective criteria and not just factual content (think of how this bears on applications of search engines and information retrieval systems). I would like to draw your attention to figure 2 on page 4 which shows both 'good' and 'bad' and their network of related adjectives which are linked at some distant point. The authors argue against a simple distance measure for classifying evaluative adjectives as they say: "even though the adjectives ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have opposite meaning—they are antonyms—they are still closely related by the synonymy relation" (p.3). So, what the London Underground people mean by 'good service' could actually express something like 'bad service' after all :) Conveniently, the authors mention one of the all-favourite quotes for anyone interested in language (p.8, footnote):
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
(Lewis Carroll, 1871)
Apparently, we can all make a word like 'good' mean anything we want, from just 'normal' to absolutely 'unsatisfactory'. The point is 'good' is definitely a word with attitude and no one likes it when a certain attitude is imposed on you.
Mai
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