When writing about grief, Peter N. Stearns and Mark Knapp (‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, in The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, ed. Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrot (London: Sage Publications, 1996): 138) speculate that ‘[i]n contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate’. Inspired by this claim, we investigated the usage of pronouns, as well as topics surrounding grief, in ballads taken from broadsides in the nineteenth century. We found that the use of first-person pronouns increases over the nineteenth century, and that this was not a linear trend; there were sharp increases in the usage of first-person pronouns beginning in 1815, which leveled off in the third quarter of the century. Additionally, we examined the usage of lyrical topics about death, grieving, negatively valenced emotion and sadness, and asked whether such topics correlated with the increased usage of first-person pronouns. We found that there was not a strong correlation with the usage of pronouns and such topics, though there was a small correlation between the usage of such pronouns and sadness and a stronger positive correlation between a focus on the present and positively valenced emotion. These findings suggest that first-person pronouns are not reliable indicators of lyrical topics surrounding grief, or vice-versa. Using personal pronouns as a measure of intimacy, we conclude that songs written in the beginning of the nineteenth century did see a rise in intimacy in song lyrics. However, this increase does not appear to be tied to songs about grief, specifically. Despite the existence of many personal grief songs in the Victorian period, our distant reading reveals linguistic trends and interrelations that challenge the intuition that nineteenth-century grief songs were more personal than earlier ones.

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十九世纪自我与悲伤的表达：远读分析

在撰写有关悲伤的文章时，Peter N. Stearns 和 Mark Knapp（“悲伤的历史观点”，《情绪：社会、文化和生物维度》，编着 Rom Harré 和 W. Gerrod Parrot（伦敦：Sage Publications，1996 年）：138 ) 推测“与 18 世纪关于死亡的歌曲相比，这些歌曲以牧羊人的人工田园世界为背景并以第三人称写成，维多利亚时代的悲伤歌曲是个人的和直接的”。受这一主张的启发，我们调查了十九世纪从宽边民谣中取材的代词的用法，以及围绕悲伤的主题。我们发现，第一人称代词的使用在 19 世纪有所增加，而且这不是线性趋势；从 1815 年开始，第一人称代词的使用急剧增加，在本世纪的第三季度趋于平稳。此外，我们检查了关于死亡、悲伤、负面情绪和悲伤的抒情主题的使用情况，并询问这些主题是否与第一人称代词的使用增加相关。我们发现代词的使用和此类主题之间没有很强的相关性，尽管此类代词的使用与悲伤之间存在很小的相关性，而关注当前情绪与正价情绪之间存在更强的正相关性。这些发现表明，第一人称代词不是围绕悲伤的抒情主题的可靠指标，反之亦然。使用人称代词作为亲密程度的衡量标准，我们得出结论，十九世纪初写的歌曲确实在歌词中看到了亲密程度的上升。然而，特别是，这种增加似乎与悲伤的歌曲无关。尽管在维多利亚时期存在许多个人悲伤歌曲，但我们的远距离阅读揭示了语言趋势和相互关系，这些趋势和相互关系挑战了 19 世纪悲伤歌曲比早期歌曲更个人化的直觉。