Ibérica (Mar 2021)
Emotion to forecast a recession: A bilingual lexical and sentiment analysis of the un and IMF world economy reports for 2019
Abstract
The present work carries out a discursive analysis of two 2019 institutional reports on the world’s economy and their Spanish translations, and endeavours to determine the role that emotion plays in the way each text is lexically verbalized. A prior lexical analysis is carried out to obtain a 60-keyword list used to create a lexical taxonomy which may allow comparison of the proportion of –emotion-free– technolects and that of emotion-laden items conceptualizing the economic situation with a positive or negative polarity in either text. Subsequently, automatic processing is conducted with Lingmotif (Moreno-Ortiz, 2017), a Sentiment Analysis software to establish the positive and/or negative polarity and the degree of emotional intensity in the texts. The analysis reveals how there exist rhetorical-linguistic differences in the way emotion is deployed between the reports in line with the goals of each institution, and that these differences are mirrored in their Spanish translations.
