Metaphor is well known to be a linguistic and cognitive tool that we use to think and talk about subjective, sensitive and complex experiences in terms of experiences that tend to be simpler and more intersubjectively accessible. Illness is one of the experiences that are often talked about and conceptualized through metaphor. In this lecture, I present the findings of three corpus-based studies of the metaphors in relation to, respectively, chronic pain, cancer and Covid-19. I show how the insights provided by large-scale metaphor analyses can have practical implications for better healthcare interventions and public health campaigns.
Elena Semino is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Fuzhou in China. She specializes in health communication, medical humanities, corpus linguistics, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis. She has (co-)authored over 110 academic publications, including: Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (Routledge, 2018).
Veranstaltet von
Projekt MedCorpInn - Retrospective Intersectional Corpuslinguistic Analysis of Radiology Reports of Innsbruck Medical University, funded by ÖAW Go!digital next Generation
www.medizinwort.at
Kontakt
Karoline Irschara, MA (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft), Karoline.irschara@uibk.ac.at