The Language of Pain

Expression or description?

Author

Chryssoula Lascaratou | University of Athens

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027238962 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027292056 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

How is the universal, yet private and subjective, experience of pain talked about by different people in everyday encounters? What does the analysis of pain-related lexico-phraseological choices, grammatical structures, and linguistic metaphors reveal as to how pain is perceived and experienced? Are pain utterances primarily used to express or to describe this experiential domain? This is the first book that investigates such questions from both a functional and a cognitive perspective: it combines two converging usage-based theoretical models in a systematic linguistic inquiry of the construal of pain in everyday language. This work is based on a specialised electronic corpus of Greek naturally-occurring dialogues in a health care context, the underlying assumption being that in the absence of factual evidence intuition about language cannot reliably detect or predict patterns of usage. Comparing Greek with English data, this book significantly contributes to the development of this research field cross-linguistically.

[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 9] 2007. xii, 238 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.9

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | pp. xi–xii

Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–8

Chapter 2. Pain and language | pp. 9–29

2.1. Introduction
2.2. The language of pain

Chapter 3. Corpus design and data collection | pp. 31–44

Chapter 4. Mode of analysis | p. 37

4.1. Introduction
4.2. Halliday's process types in modelling experience

Chapter 5. Data analysis and general discussion | pp. 45–57

5.1. Introduction
5.2. Pain: Process, participant or quality?
5.3. Key lexical items and their frequencies

Chapter 6. The construal of pain as process | pp. 59–101

6.1. Introduction
6.2. Foolen's account of the communication of emotions and pain behaviour
6.3. General characteristics of pain as process
6.4. Process types and structural functions in ponao constructions

Chapter 7. The construal of pain as thing-participant | pp. 103–132

7.1. Introduction
7.2. Grammatically construed semantic properties of ponos
7.3. Structural configurations featuring ponos as participant

Chapter 8. Pain and metaphor | pp. 133–181

8.1. Introduction
8.2. The conceptual grounding of ponos metaphors and their linguistic realisation
8.3. Lost for words
8.4. Concluding remarks

Chapter 9. Conclusions | pp. 183–196

Appendix A | pp. 207–213

Appendix B | pp. 215–218

Appendix C | pp. 219–232

Name index | pp. 233–234

Subject index | pp. 235–237

“Chryssoula Lascaratou’s book on pain language is a wonderful achievement. It synthesizes several different approaches in an attempt to understand the conceptual patterns underlying pain-related expressions in Greek. She is aware that no single approach can come to terms with the bewildering complexities of this universal phenomenon. She successfully integrates Halliday’s functional grammar with cognitive grammar and semantics, a bottom-up and a top-down methodology, and linguistics with philosophy. The result is a thorough, penetrating, and beautifully complex study of human suffering.”

Zoltán Kövecses, Professor of Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

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[no author supplied]

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