The Language of Suicide Notes: A Corpus-based Stylistic Analysis

This study aimed to contribute the literature of suicide notes studies, especially those who are mainly interested in analyzing content and stylistics studies intended extract linguistics features a particular text/corpus. It was designed investigate compare set stylistic collection collected by Shneidman Farberow 1957 posted on an online website (Reddit) 2018-2020. examine whether there is any change language between these two collections data due different periods time medium (the first includes written while second notes). So, achieve aim study, types corpora were compiled, one dedicated Farberow’s (1957) for (2018-2020). The examined their most frequent POS, distribution words, TTR, words sentences’ length. analysis conducted using CLAWS (UCREL, 2020), “the Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System” part-of-speech tagging, WordSmith 8.0 software (Scott, 2020). Such indicated that: both employed informal style writing, but sentences used OSN tend be longer more complicated than SSN. Both had lower TTR STTR, which that they not lexically diverse. Their highly repetitive because concentrated or themes only. Finally, concerning word distributions, verbs type, followed nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs.