|
If you're ever reading a book or watching a movie and get the distinct feeling you've come across the story before – or even better, can predict exactly what's going to happen next –there could be a good reason for that. 如果你在读书或者看电影时清晰地感觉到这个故事似曾相识——或者更厉害的，你能准确预测出后面会发生些什么——嗯，这种感觉可不是毫无依据的。 Computer scientists have sifted through the language of more than 1,700 works of fiction and discovered that English literature consists of just six kinds of emotional arcs that make up nearly all of the most well-known stories. 计算机科学家们在测查了1700多部小说后，发现英语文学中只包含六种情感弧线，而几乎所有的名著都是由它们构成的。 While literary theorists have for centuries characterised and counted the basic plots and structures that writers use in stories, it's unlikely there's ever been such a rigorous scientific analysis of English fiction like this before. 尽管若干世纪以来，文学理论家们一直在研究作家写故事时应用的基本情节和结构，分析它们的特征，历数其种类，但好像此前从来没有针对英语小说做过如此严谨的科学分析。 Researchers from the Computational Story Laboratory at the University of Vermont mined the complete text of some 1,737 fiction works available on Project Gutenberg, an online collection of more than 50,000 digital books in the public domain. By analysing the sentiment of language used in chunks of text 10,000 words long in each of these texts, the researchers were able to register the emotional ups and downs for the stories as a whole. Negative words like "poverty", "dead", and "punishment" dragged the sentiment down, while positive terms like "love", "peace", and "friend" brought it up. | 
