Emotion is frequently conceived, in the speech science literature, in such a way as to organize the relationship between specific emotions taken as psychological concepts and phonetic parameters such as voice quality, speech rate, and prominence, in the phonetic domain. The main goal of this paper is to propose a language-based analysis of the emotional content of the text in order to get a more abstract and culturally independent approach of emotion in speech. This work presents an experiment that relates speech rate and the temporality as a constitutive element of emotion. We are able to quantify the temporal content of emotion in the text by a semiotics analysis.