Do Happy Words Sound Happy ? A study of the relation between form and meaning for English words expressing emotions

This paper presents a study of the relation between a word’s form and the emotion it expresses. We analyze the possibility that the form of words expressing emotions is not completely arbitrary, but in fact, their sound evokes the emotion conveyed. We explore the relation between word form and emotions using a variety of word form representations and machine learning methods. We first show that words expressing an emotion are more similar among them than with words expressing other emotions, and then we discuss the sounds of emotions.

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