2026-10-10T18:20:23Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/34048336 2026-10-01T17:32:44Z category_146 category_734 category_106 portal_5 item_type_6 month_year_10_2026

<p>Figs 4 to 7 and Tables 2 & 3.</p> Donald Snyder (25157773) Space Science Biological Sciences not elsewhere classified Science Policy print page placement news text analysis meaningful linguistic feature including news reports vivid language – exploratory analyses show political news context div >< p average concreteness declines concrete language analyses suggest two million taken together scalable tool psycholinguistic measure opinion content generally use document formats descriptive formats concreteness may articles published article length approximately 40 applying concreteness <div><p>This study introduces lexical “concreteness” – a psycholinguistic measure of vivid language – as a scalable tool for political and news text analysis. Using a dictionary of approximately 40,000 English word lemmas rated for concreteness, this construct is applied to more than two million <i>New York Times</i> articles published between 2000 and 2025. Exploratory analyses show that average concreteness declines over time in headlines and abstracts and varies systematically across material categories, document formats, print page placement, and article length. Descriptive formats, including news reports and biographies or obituaries, generally use more concrete language than editorial or opinion content. Taken together, these analyses suggest that concreteness may be a meaningful linguistic feature in the political news context, capturing unique stylistic features in media language.</p></div> 2026-10-01T17:32:42Z Text Journal contribution 10.1371/journal.pone.0359092.s001 https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_p_Figs_4_to_7_and_Tables_2_3_p_/34048336 CC BY 4.0