Abstract
Emotion terms such as “sad”, “happy”, and “joyful” apply to a wide range of entities. We use them to refer to mental states of sentient beings, and also to describe features of non-mental things such as comportment, nature, events, artworks and so on. Drawing on the literature on polysemy, this article provides an in-depth analysis of emotion descriptions. It argues that emotion terms are polysemous and distinguishes seven related senses. In addition, the article applies the analysis to shed light on a long-standing debate in philosophy of music concerning emotion descriptions of music.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 74-92 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Mind & Language |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Feb 2025 |
Keywords
- emotion
- expressiveness
- music
- music psychology
- polysemy