Evaluative Adjectives In Documentary Films

3.2. Findings

In order to find out what are the most frequently used adjectives in comedy and documentary films, the qualitative and quantitative perspectives were employed in the analysis of the data. For the quantitative perspective, adjectives in the film reviews were counted and divided into two groups– evaluative and descriptive - to see which are the most frequently used, but for the qualitative research, the most frequently used evaluative adjectives were analyzed and divided into two sections – positive and negative adjectives.

Firstly, forty different film reviews (twenty comedy genre and twenty documentary genre) were randomly chosen from one of the most commonly used and suggested webpages that Roger Ebert administrates. Roger

As the main task of this research was to analyse the adjectives contextually, determining only whether adjective is positive or negative in the context, these type of adjectives, as we saw in the example above ,were counted in with their contextual meaning.

In some sentences it was difficult to determine weather the adjective given has a positive meaning or negative in the context. For example, She stars, directs and is the co-writer, setting the film 's goofy tone. In this sentence it is difficult to determine whether adjective goofy is positive or negative. On the one hand, the adjective on its own is more neutral than negative or positive, because for some people goofy associates with funny (positive meaning) but others may associate it with foolish(negative meaning). In this review the adjective foolish contextually has both of these features and that is why it was hard to decide wather it should be in the positive or negative adjective group. These type of adjectives were not counted