Affective Meaning in Language and Discourse: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the evolution, intellectual structure, and thematic analysis of affective meaning research using bibliometric analysis of 154 English-language articles and review articles from 1994 to 2025 in the Web of Science Core Collection. The publication trend, collaboration network, co-citation network, co-occurrence of keywords, clustering of themes, and temporal evolution were explored using CiteSpace. A significant increase in the number of research publications after 2018 is evident, as well as widespread geographic involvement and relatively scattered institutional and author collaboration. Cited-author and cited-journal networks, on the other hand, show a much larger common intellectual ground that includes systemic functional linguistics and Appraisal, stance and evaluation studies, corpus linguistics, pragmatics and interactional approaches. Some co-existing trends of research are also identified in the present corpus through keyword and cluster analyses using corpus-based, interactional, multimodal, cross-cultural, second-language and context-specific approaches. Temporal patterns suggest that these developments occurred in conjunction with ongoing language- and discourse-based issues, revealing a process of gradual thematic diversification instead of sudden thematic replacement. Therefore, the results suggest a field that, while intellectually connected, is conceptually plural. Future studies should focus on more explicitly comparing and integrating constructs that overlap, cross-linguistic validation, and methodological designs that integrate corpus and contextual evidence and multimodal interpretation.