Ousiometrics and Telegnomics: The essence of meaning conforms to a two-dimensional powerful-weak and dangerous-safe framework with diverse corpora presenting a safety bias

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new two-dimensional power-danger framework for understanding the essence of meaning in language, revealing a bias towards safety in large-scale English corpora and proposing a novel measurement instrument.

Contribution

It redefines the core dimensions of meaning from EPA to power-danger, introduces ousiograms and synousionyms, and develops a prototype ousiometer for temporal analysis of language corpora.

Findings

Language exhibits a safety bias across diverse corpora.

The power-danger framework generalizes the affect circumplex model.

A prototype ousiometer can measure ousiometric time series.

Abstract

We define `ousiometrics' to be the study of essential meaning in whatever context that meaningful signals are communicated, and `telegnomics' as the study of remotely sensed knowledge. From work emerging through the middle of the 20th century, the essence of meaning has become generally accepted as being well captured by the three orthogonal dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activation (EPA). By re-examining first types and then tokens for the English language, and through the use of automatically annotated histograms -- `ousiograms' -- we find here that: 1. The essence of meaning conveyed by words is instead best described by a compass-like power-danger (PD) framework, and 2. Analysis of a disparate collection of large-scale English language corpora -- literature, news, Wikipedia, talk radio, and social media -- shows that natural language exhibits a systematic bias toward safe, low danger words -- a reinterpretation of the Pollyanna principle's positivity bias for written expression. To help justify our choice of dimension names and to help address the problems with representing observed ousiometric dimensions by bipolar adjective pairs, we introduce and explore `synousionyms' and `antousionyms' -- ousiometric counterparts of synonyms and antonyms. We further show that the PD framework revises the circumplex model of affect as a more general model of state of mind. Finally, we use our findings to construct and test a prototype `ousiometer', a telegnomic instrument that measures ousiometric time series for temporal corpora. We contend that our power-danger ousiometric framework provides a complement for entropy-based measurements, and may be of value for the study of a wide variety of communication across biological and artificial life.