As some of you know, I’m currently studying to get my MA in linguistics. In my field, you can study basically anything pertaining to language. I’ve focused mostly on fiction. Specifically YA. I thought I’d share some of my early results with you guys.
What I do:
Within the broader field of linguistics, my area of expertise is in corpus linguistics. This means I use computer programs to run language analysis on large bodies of text. For my thesis, I built a corpus, or text database of YA. I’ve been comparing my database against a database of adult books and a database of younger children’s (5-14) books to see what the differences are.
Some results:
I based a lot of my research on a study out of Oxford comparing children’s literature to adult literature. One of the key findings in their study was that children’s books used a lot more words that focused on the physical world, while adult books used a lot more words that focused on time relationships.
My hypothesis, which I’m still testing, is that YA falls in between. They’re more physical than adult books, but more focused on time than children’s books. One finding of mine that supports the idea of YA being more physical is the relative frequency of words for different body parts in YA.
All counts are normalized per 1 million words
We can also see that there’s a difference in pronoun use in YA books. The word I is used much more in YA, which likely suggests that first person narration is more common in YA than adult. Also, for all groups, masculine pronouns were more common than feminine pronouns.
Finally, and this may only be interesting to hardcore linguists, the Oxford study found that modals (the words can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, and must) appeared more commonly in children’s books than adult books, with YA falling in the middle. However, while overall modal usage was highest in children’s, individual modals varied quite a bit.
This is actually kind of strange from a linguistic standpoint. Modals are are pretty high frequency, so they should appear fairly evenly. Honestly, I’m still working on this part of my analysis, so if any of you lovely readers have any ideas why the charts look like this, I’d love to hear them!
Hopefully this wasn’t super boring. If you have questions or things you’d like me to include in future research, let me know in the comments. I’m more than happy to geek out and talk to you about this stuff.
