Negative-toned "ruminate"?

[Tyler Schnoebelen]

I wonder how "rumination" (etc) has circulated since those early citatioms. My own intuition was also that "ruminate" skewed negative. Not as strongly as
"brood", but negative nonetheless.

The main problem with verifying this is that people just don't use it. For
example, I checked out collocates within a 5-word window of it in COCA but the counts are so small that why bother reporting them. Not surprisingly, it doesn't show up enough in my Twitter corpus that I can report anything
(e.g., its tendency to appear with various emoticons). Nor can I turn to the Cornell Movie Dialogs corpus or IMBD reviews or Experience Project
confessionals, or song lyrics. Nor does it appear in Fisher or in the (Dialog Acts annotated part of) Switchboard. 

There are a number of psychologists who have asked people to assess the
emotionality of various words. I'm blanking on the one that is the biggest.
The ANEW data set is one example (but "ruminat*" isn't among the words they check and I recall feeling like there were issues with their methodology
anyhow). Tal Yarkoni has a really interesting set of word-by-bloggers tied
to personality assessments they filled in, but if "ruminat*" occurs in the
dataset, it doesn't make it into the ~500 personality-predictive words he
reports.

Tyler
https://twitter.com/TSchnoebelen
http://corplinguistics.wordpress.com
and for a little while longer,http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers 

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