Emotion descriptions and musical expressiveness

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.