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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. 213–228

Chapter 11
Emotions in Goemai (Nigeria)

Perspectives from a documentary corpus

A central goal of language documentation is to create corpora that are multipurpose and can be used to investigate topics that they were not intended for. Such corpora have started to increasingly become available over the past few years. This contribution takes a language documentation perspective on the topic of this joint volume: it explores the multipurpose nature of an existing corpus (on the language Goemai), which was not constructed for investigating emotions. It shows that the corpus is multipurpose to the extent that it contains a significant amount of information (on emotion expressions, their distribution, and relevant language ideologies). But it also shows its limitations in that the corpus only allows us to identify patterns and develop hypotheses – but does not address all the questions.

Keywords: Nigeria, Goemai, Chadic languages, language documentation, documentary corpus, emotion expressions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Goemai and the Goemai corpus
  • 3.Emotions in the Goemai corpus
    • 3.1Elicited emotion expressions
    • 3.2Emotions in the naturalistic data
  • 4.S’ók k’wál: To hide one’s speech
  • 5.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.19.11hel
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