Rhyme within reason: an emotion analysis approach to rhyme in a historical corpus

We applied natural language processing methods to a corpus of Spanish sonnets (15th–17th centuries) to examine the semantics of rhyme words in terms of sentiment analysis (i.e. positive or negative connotation) and emotion analysis. The analyzed corpus comprises the Corpus of Spanish Golden-Age Sonnets and the corresponding period of the Diachronic Spanish Sonnet Corpus. Sentiment and emotion analysis of rhyme words was performed to detect stylistic patterns within the work of an author and across poets. We adopted a lexicon-based approach, updating the lemmas available in the lexicons to account for morphological and orthographic specificities of the historical variant under analysis. Our study describes trends regarding the semantic properties of rhyme in the Spanish Golden Age sonnet. The methodology can be easily adapted to other poetic forms, languages and periods, which can contribute to the debate around the semantic dimension of rhyme as a rhetorical device.

Palabras clave: Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Analysis