Multiword units and N-Grams naming FEAR in the Israel-Corpus

Emotions play a special role in the Israel-Corpus (a corpus consisting of 274 recordings of narrative autobiographical interviews with emigrants from German-speaking regions of Central Europe created under the direction of Anne Betten between 1989 and 2012). The connection between narrative representation and the expression of one’s own and the feelings of others is of central importance: the central questions posed by the interviewers take the interviewees on a journey into the past (Leonardi 2016: 2) and lead them to stories and reports about dramatic and difficult experiences, so that not only emotions of the past are awakened when they are related and remembered, but also new emotions arise in the narrative process itself. The aim of the paper is to analyze emotions (emotion denominations and expressions) using a quantitative-qualitative approach. Corpuslinguistic studies that focus on emotions in the whole Israel-Corpus or in only one of the subcorpora (IS, ISW or ISZ) are still pending even though they would have been advantageous: they can highlight significantly occurring emotive signs and patterns of language use (Bubenhofer 2009) in the underlying discourse. In the following paper I will concentrate only on the emotion FEAR (in German ANGST) analyzing the lexemes and the multiword expressions which name and express it in the subcorpus ISW.