A concept analysis of Jonathan Swift'sA tale of a Tub andGulliver's Travels

Part 1. The core of the concept analysis method is a dictionary of 43,000 words to each of which is assigned up to 5 of 168 concepts. Computer programs read each word of a text and produce a concept frequency profile of the text.Part 2. Comparisons of concept profiles ofTub andGulliver and Swift's own contemporary texts, as well as a composite text of 18th century writers, reveal thatGulliver is conceptually different fromTub and its coevals. The fourth book ofGulliver (Houyhnhnms) is significantly different from the first three books. The last two books ofGulliver (Laputa and Houyhnhnms) are more likeTub than are the first two books (Lilliput and Brobdingnag).Part 3. The concepts and words supporting these distinctions suggest two strands in Swift's thinking: the first, pessimism about the human condition; the second, interest in the quotidian world. Finally, such issues as disambiguation of homonyms, scoring of phrases, and the role of syntax are considered.Julius Laffal is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (in Psychology) at Yale University. He was Director of Research and Psychological Services at Connecticut Valley Hospital from 1969 to 1985. He has been Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University, and Professor in Residence, Psychology, at University of Connecticut. He is the author ofNormal and Pathological Language (1965) andA Concept Dictionary of English with Computer Programs for Content Analysis (1990).     

The contextual associates of sun and God in Schreber's autobiography.

"An objective procedure of contextual analysis was applied to test opposing predictions derived from Freud's (1948) and from Macalpine and Hunter's (1955) studies of the Schreber case. Freud maintained that both God and sun were father symbols for Schreber; Macalpine and Hunter contended that God and sun were ambisexual symbols and stressed their feminine connotations. The… analysis involved categorizing words appearing in close association with the key words God, sun, and Flechsig and in close connection with male and female words, and correlating the distributions of categorized responses with each other. It was found that the way Schreber wrote about God was significantly more like the way he wrote about male… ." The same was true with Flechsig, but the way Schreber wrote about God was not synonomous with the way he wrote about sun. From Psyc Abstracts 36:02:2HM74L. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in the language of a schizophrenic patient during psychotherapy.

A method of linguistic analysis (Bousfield et al, 1958) is applied to the speech of a schizophrenic patient to demonstrate the changes that have occurred in the course of psychotherapy. The analysis showed that as the patient's behavior became less disorganized, so did his speech; however, the content of his speech revealed constriction of ideation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conforming behavior of psychiatric and medical patients.

"A group of ten non-psychotic psychiatric patients in the open ward of a general hospital was compared with seven medical patients without disabling psychiatric symptoms, with respect to the variability of their judgments of the autokinetic phenomenon… . The results indicated that neurotic Ss were consistently more variable than nonneurotic Ss in their judgments and were less affected by the group influence." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hypotheses of opposite speech.

A continued analysis of the meaning of "opposite speech," i.e., the use of the reverse apparently intended, in schizophrenics, accompanied by a clinical illustration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psycholinguistics and the Psychology of Language.

Comments that two recent papers in the American Psychologist deal with the problem of sentences in language (G. A. Miller, "Some psychological studies of grammar," American Psychologist, 1962, 17, 748-762, see record 1963-06655-001; C. E. Osgood, "On understanding and creating sentences," American Psychologist, 1963, 18, 735-751, see record 1964-07405-001). Earlier, a paper by Mowrer (1954) dealt with substantially the same subject. These papers attempt a psychological approach to what is traditionally a linguistic problem, hence are aptly labeled "psycholinguistic" efforts. The present author believes a distinction is in order between "psycholinguistics" in this sense, and the "psychology of language." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Opposite speech" in a schizophrenic patient.

"An unusual speech syndrome of a schizophrenic patient, in which "yes" and "no" and other opposites are reversed without awareness on the part of the patient, has been described. In discussion the reversal of a strongly established linguistic discrimination, it was pointed out that learning theorists have largely neglected the study of pathological language… . Evidence was offered to support the view that the opposite speech of the patient served primarily as a means of coping with hostile impulses." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Response faults in word association as a function of response entropy.

"Response faults in word association were found to be highly correlated with the entropy of the response hierarchy and with the number of different responses available to the stimulus words. This finding throws doubt on the notion that response faults are largely attributable to interference by emotional factors, in word association. Studies of personal values and perceptual defense which have used words equated on familiarity by the Thorndike-Lorge word count, but which have not taken into account the response hierarchies of the stimulus words, may bear re-evaluation in terms of this variable." 25 references (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A concept analysis of Jonathan Swift'sA tale of a Tub andGulliver's Travels

Language Resources and Evaluation - Part 1. The core of the concept analysis method is a dictionary of 43,000 words to each of which is assigned up to 5 of 168 concepts. Computer programs read each...