A corpus-based stylistic analysis of online suicide notes retrieved from Reddit

This study examines the stylistic linguistic features of a collection of suicide notes retrieved from the online platform Reddit from the period (2012–2020). It aims to conduct a detailed corpus-based stylistic analysis. Furthermore, it aims at checking specific selected stylistic categories. The quantitative analysis was performed using WordSmith 8.0 software which helps to identify keywords in context. Keywords are indicators of the style of the language of the selected corpus. The analysis result indicated that the redditors in the online suicide corpus usually included simple words with fairly short sentences. Their writings tend to be less lexically diverse, concentrating on one or two themes with a lower TTR (type-token ratio), which indicated that their words were relatively repetitive. Online suicide notes show high frequency in using first-person singular pronouns, and concerning the distribution of content words, the verbs were the most frequently used part of speech, followed by nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Furthermore, the keywords list helps to reveal stylistic and linguistic elements.