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Part of
Consensus and Dissent: Negotiating Emotion in the Public Space
Edited by Anne Storch
[Culture and Language Use 19] 2017
► pp. 81–104

Chapter 5
Emotions in Jamaican

African conceptualizations, emblematicity and multimodality in discourse and public spaces

This contribution deals with expressions and conceptualizations of emotions in Jamaican. By drawing on various examples and their performances in public and digital spaces, this paper argues that what we conceive as ‘emotion’ is indeed a complex and often culturally defined phenomenon which intertwines with a range of related concepts. The focus here lies on expressions of emotions which reflect African cultural conceptualizations. This also includes discussing a West African holistic and embodied conceptualization of ‘feeling’ as compared to the Western notion of ‘emotion’. Moreover, the chapter discusses the multimodality of emotional expressions by looking at examples in a few Jamaican movies, songs and social media. I argue that certain emotional expressions are culturally emblematic and that their performance serves as a marker of identity by drawing on the various functions of language according to Roman Jakobson.

Keywords: emotion, feeling, Jamaican, body parts, multimodality, ideophones, metalinguistic labels
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Body parts and emotion
  • 3.Multimodal expressions of emotions: The case of kiss-teeth
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.19.05hol
References

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Browne, C. (Dir.)
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Silvera, C. (Dir.)
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Mensah, Eyo O. & Vivian Afi Dzokoto
2023. Melting intestines, red hearts, and scattering eyes: exploring embodiment in the Efik feeling lexica. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 44:1 ► pp. 49 ff. DOI logo
Nassenstein, Nico, Alice Mitchell & Andrea Hollington
2024. Chapter 1. Introduction. In Anthropological Linguistics [Culture and Language Use, 23], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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