Emotional Somatisms - A Corpus Study.

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2015-07-22
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en
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The goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between figurative speech, or more specifically idiomatic expressions, and emotions in spoken Dutch. Hereby I will focus on a special type of idiomatic expressions, namely somatisms that express an emotion. Somatisms are idiomatic expressions that consist of at least one body part. In order to do so, a list of Dutch idiomatic expressions containing an emotion was created using multiple sources. The expressions were divided in a few main categories, based on their semantics. Secondly, the expressions that consisted of at least one body part were selected, and categorized based on the type of emotion they contained. Furthermore, several subcategories within the selection of these emotional somatisms were identified. Subsequently, all items on the list of emotional somatisms were cross-checked within the database of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (CGN). For every expression that was found in conversations within the CGN, several characteristics were recorded and analyzed. Among these characteristics were information about the recording, the speaker, the type and context of the conversation. Furthermore, information about the way the emotional somatism was used (in a referential or expressive way), and why the emotional somatism was used (e.g. due to inexpress! ibility, compactness or vividness) was determined.
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Faculteit der Letteren