Evaluative Language in the Cameroonian Grassfields

This book presents a pioneering examination of a piece of political oratory delivered in the Grassfields Bantu language of Isu. It engages constructively with the Western biases of the Appraisal framework, developed by Martin & White (2005) to analyse evaluative language and interpersonal positioning, by providing empirical evidence from an African context and adapting it to the cultural values on the ground. As such, it marks a major advance in the theoretical and practical applications of this model while at the same time making a substantial and innovative contribution to the description of an underdescribed African language. The insights gained from this research have the potential to inform future work within this paradigm on non-Indo-European languages and in non-Western settings.