Sentiment analysis of weather news in British online newspapers

The advancement of modern technologies has influenced the way news is presented and consumed, particularly online. Weather is an important topic for the public as it relates to the human experience and addresses current societal issues. In this paper, we introduce a systematic approach to conduct sentiment analysis of weather news stories, to specify the emotional tone and examine the role of subjectivity in online news reporting. This research falls within the scope of a lexicon-based (unsupervised) approach to sentiment analysis, which involves finding the sentiment polarity of words. The analysis is predominantly based on sentence-level sentiment analysis. Two popular online web services, MonkeyLearn and SentiStrength, were applied to automatically detect human emotions. We compared the efficiency of each tool and found that MonkeyLearn provided better final results in comparison to SentiStrength, which tended to misclassify negative sentiments into neutral ones. The final results of frequency calculation showed the dominance of weather news stories with negative sentiment polarity over positive and neutral ones, with neutral sentiments being in the minority. Based on the empirical findings, we observed an objectivity-to-subjectivity shift in online news reporting

Lexical combinations of contemporary British military fiction: lexical-semantic and stylistic features

This article focuses on the lexical-semantic features of the language means of contemporary British military fiction. Despite the sustained philological attention to fictional texts of different genres, the relative disregard of the lexical patterning in fiction on military themes stands in need of scrutiny. In order to account for all the lingual and extralingual factors influencing the process of fictional text composition, this article takes a philological approach and conducts an integrated analysis – combining linguistic and literary-theoretical perspectives – of the lexical patterning of contemporary military fiction. Our aim is to establish the main lexical-semantic and stylistic peculiarities of the dominant lexical combinations in contemporary British fiction with macro-, meso- and micro-inclusions of military themes. Functions of the thematic lexicon connected with the war topic are more obvious in the literary texts with macro- and meso-inclusions of military themes. However, their role in the texts with micro-inclusions of military themes is quite significant as well: the details of the military environment and phenomena serve as a means of establishing a close connection between the reader and the storyworld; recollections of the war period echo in the plot line of the characters, reflecting its destructive consequences even long afterwards