Hausa has the largest population of speakers in the Chadic language family and is spoken in the West African sub-region as a first language, particularly in Nigeria, Niger, Benin, Chad, Togo, and Ghana (Caron 2013). It is spoken by millions of non-Hausas as a second language (Inuwa 2017). Hausa is one of the three dominant languages spoken in Nigeria as a national language, and it is predominantly spoken in the northern Nigerian states (Newman 2000; Crysmann 2010). To the best of our knowledge, there is no reliable existing body of Hausa information or a massive electronic collection of Hausa text, which linguists can consult for research. This dataset is an attempt to contribute to the development of a robust body of information and/or a comprehensive electronic collection of Hausa texts, thereby enhancing the reliability of Hausa linguistic research.

This dataset was basically sourced through researchers' native-speaker intuition, observations, and unstructured interviews. This dataset, originally compiled as preparation for the related publication, contains 332 eye-related expressions on different topics related to the typical Hausa people's lifestyle, e.g., related to culture, religion, politics, education, and health. The datafile contains a totality of about 6444 words, all glossed in English.

Abstract of related publication: Unlike previous studies which generally seem to focus more on Hausa metaphorical expressions, this study investigates a wide range of uses of ίdὸ ‘eye’ in its constructional metonymy patterns in the language by exploring corpus data that contain over 300 eye-related expressions. We observe that some constructional metonymies maintain a set of fixed words and syntax in activating conceptual shifts and producing eye metonymies while others have semi-fixed patterns and produce the same metonymies. Lexical items like tsόkάlế, kὰn, ὰ, dὰ, and bὰsίrὰ among others are constant constituents in the constructional metonymies in which they appear. In the metonymic chaining, the basic mapping of eye metonymies occurs via the PART FOR PART relation under E-metonymies and the SUB- FOR SUPERCATEGORY relation under C-metonymies. We also observe that E→E→C coding has the highest chained metonymic structure in the creation of the eye metonymies. Both attributive and predicative colligates motivate metonymic senses in the language. Finally, our analysis reveals that the eye is metonymically conceptualized and semantically extended to various target domains and produces metonymic conceptualizations that make the eye stand for vision, desire, envy, control, attention, perception, person, meeting, brain, intelligence, and so on.