DOI: 10.18485/judig.2026.2.ch6 ISSN:
Hierarchical Recognition of Moral Foundations in Serbian Literary Corpus SrpELTeC
Milena Šošić, Ranka Stankovićvirtue
and
vice
categories –
care/harm
,
fairness/cheating
,
loyalty/betrayal
,
authority/subversion
and
purity/degradation
, within different segments of Serbian novels. The computation was performed using a developed lexicon of moral words
MFD.SR
, adapted to the linguistic and cultural characteristics of Serbian language. A key methodological contribution of this work is the recognition of moral signals across multiple levels of a hierarchically structured corpus, which enables comparable moral analysis of texts of varying sizes and characteristics. In this way, the method produces both macro and micro level representations of moral dynamics within literary narratives, that allows fine-grained tracking of shifts in moral values across different corpus segments. Preliminary results indicate that Serbian novels first published in 1840-1920. time period, exhibit distinct and measurable moral signatures across authors and literary movements, which offers new insights into the ideological and cultural structure of Serbian literature from this period.