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8 - ‘Suffering’ Illnesses and ‘Experiencing’ Symptoms

Ways of Talking about Having Mental Illness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

Hazel Price
Affiliation:
University of Salford
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Summary

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Language of Mental Illness
Corpus Linguistics and the Construction of Mental Illness in the Press
, pp. 198 - 225
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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