Abstract
This study aimed to contribute to the literature of suicide notes studies, especially those who are mainly interested in analyzing the content of suicide notes and the stylistics studies intended to extract the linguistics features of a particular text/corpus. It was designed to investigate and compare a set of linguistics stylistic features of a collection of suicide notes collected by Shneidman and Farberow in 1957 and a collection of suicide notes posted on an online website (Reddit) in 2018-2020. This study aimed to examine whether there is any change in the language of suicide notes between these two collections of data due to the different periods of time and medium (the first collection includes written suicide notes while the second includes posted online suicide notes). So, to achieve the aim of the study, two types of corpora were compiled, one dedicated to Shneidman and Farberow’s collection of suicide notes (1957) and the second for the online suicide notes (2018-2020). The two corpora were examined for their most frequent POS, distribution of content words, TTR, and words and sentences’ length. The analysis was conducted using CLAWS (UCREL, 2020), “the Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System” for part-of-speech tagging, and WordSmith 8.0 software (Scott, 2020). Such analysis indicated that: both types employed an informal style of writing, but the words and sentences used in OSN tend to be longer and more complicated than those in SSN. Both corpora had lower TTR and STTR, which indicated that they were not lexically diverse. Their words were highly repetitive because they concentrated on one or two themes only. Finally, concerning content word distributions, the verbs were the most frequent type, followed by nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs.
Highlights
According to (World Health Organization, 2019), suicide is the third leading cause of death among people whose ages range between 15 to 19 years old
Figure (7) total frequency of content words in OSN. It appears that the SSN and the OSN are similar to some extent in the distribution of content words, the verbs are the most frequent type to use in the two corpora, the pronouns and nouns cover a higher frequency in both, and regarding the adjective and adverbs both cover lower frequency in the two corpora
A corpus-based stylistic analysis has been done with the aid of WordSmith software and annotation statistic software to two types of corpora that included two collections of suicide notes
Summary
According to (World Health Organization, 2019), suicide is the third leading cause of death among people whose ages range between 15 to 19 years old. While a suicide note is “a note that a person writes and leaves before killing himself or herself.”. Suicidal people tend to leave suicide notes before they commit suicide. As a definition of suicide notes that the researchers deal with in this study; Suicide notes are defined as a piece of writing written/posted online by people who dare to end their lives and admit that they did it intentionally and willingly for different reasons, which vary according to their circumstances. Suicidal people usually explain this behavior (committing suicide) by leaving suicide notes in which they will either express their feelings to their lovers or blame someone or just have a chance to say their last words
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