Richard Thompson’s adjectives

I am a huge fan of Richard Thompson; I think he's an incredible musician and a brilliant songwriter.

In his book about Richard and Linda Thompson’s album Shoot Out the Lights, Hayden Childs makes an intriguing suggestion in Appendix F, “Other Detritus Too Esoteric for Even These Appendices”: “A pie chart showing the most frequently employed adjectives in all Richard Thompson songs.” Well, I like this kind of thing, and I have a computer, so why not?

Methodology

First, I must apologize for not being Mark Liberman; he would have written this up as a Breakfast Experiment™ on Language Log using more sophisticated tools and with cool graphs that dance around the screen whilst humming RT melodies.

Richard Thompson has conveniently put up lyrics to all his songs on his website. I wrote a script to download all of these (pausing after each song so as not to overload the server); I cleaned up each file to leave only the lyrics, without any of the boilerplate links, formatting, etc. There are various issues: Some songs, especially from the Fairport Convention days, are covers, e.g. of Bob Dylan songs or Child Ballads; some songs appear in different versions. I did not try to correct for these, figuring that even the covers are at least representative of the kind of lyrics that Thompson saw fit to include on albums.

A further issue is that the repetition of a word in a particular song skews the results, or at least may be regarded as skewing the results. For example, 20 of the 21 examples of reckless come from Reckless Kind. I figured, though, that a word repeated frequently in a song is at least important enough to repeat; that is, the repetition itself indicates that it's important.

The entire corpus came to 87,866 words. I ran this though an automated part-of-speech tagger (I used TreeTagger, developed by Helmut Schmid in the TC project at the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the University of Stuttgart), and then counted up the results. Like many computational taggers, TreeTagger uses a more sophisticated analysis of parts of speech than most people are familiar with, so I conformed the results to the familiar English p-o-s descriptions. Finally, I sorted the results.

It would be useful to compare this to baseline frequencies of these adjectives in a standard English corpus, but I didn't have the time.

The results

The full list of course goes on for quite some length. But here are the first 100 (or so; there were ties) most common adjectives in Richard Thompson’s songs:

old	149
little	139
good	129
more	77
bad	71
long	65
poor	64
wrong	62
hard	58
other	55
sweet	55
dead	51
young	50
many	49
dark	48
cold	48
best	46
last	44
new	41
rich	40
next	38
better	37
blue	37
true	36
free	34
black	33
first	32
lonely	31
own	31
same	31
right	31
much	30
left	30
small	30
only	27
real	25
blind	24
high	23
precious	22
whole	22
wide	22
crazy	22
big	21
reckless	21
mine	20
loving	20
strange	20
empty	20
fine	19
restless	19
easy	18
white	18
great	18
sure	18
grey	18
cruel	17
happy	17
perfect	17
sad	17
wild	16
red	16
bright	15
dumb	15
live	15
fair	14
slow	14
strong	14
few	14
twisted	14
late	14
alive	14
full	14
such	13
shady	13
human	13
weary	13
different	12
dirty	12
wise	12
lucky	12
low	12
green	12
sorry	12
rare	12
sick	12
hungry	12
light	11
tired	11
deep	11
bonny	11
afraid	11
plain	11
mad	11
worth	11
simple	11
famous	10
wonderful	10
two-faced	10
back	10
enough	10
ready	10

The Analysis

Um, no. I’m not a critic, I’m just a lexicographer and sometime programmer. I’ll leave the analysis for people smarter than I am. I will, however, mention that though this list does include a lot of words people would not be surprised to see in RT songs (poor, wrong, dead, dark, cold, lonely, crazy, empty, restless), it is nonetheless the case that good is much more common than bad.

Enjoy.