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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 28:1 (2023) ► pp.28–59

Corpus linguistics and clinical psychology

Investigating personification in first-person accounts of voice-hearing

ORCID logo | Lancaster University
ORCID logo | Lancaster University
ORCID logo | University College London
| Lancaster University
ORCID logo | Durham University
Triangulating corpus linguistic approaches with other (linguistic and non-linguistic) approaches enhances “both the rigour of corpus linguistics and its incorporation into all kinds of research” (McEnery & Hardie, 2012: 227). Our study investigates an important area of mental health research: the experiences of those who hear voices that others cannot hear, and particularly the ways in which those voices are described as person-like. We apply corpus methods to augment the findings of a qualitative approach to 40 interviews with voice-hearers, whereby each interview was coded as involving ‘minimal’ or ‘complex’ personification of voices. Our analysis provides linguistic evidence in support of the qualitative coding of the interviews, but also goes beyond a binary approach by revealing different types and degrees of personification of voices, based on how they are referred to and described by voice-hearers. We relate these findings to concepts that inform therapeutic interventions in clinical psychology.
Keywords: health communication, triangulation, collocation, normalisation, personification
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Approaches to personification of voices in clinical psychology
  • 3.Corpus linguistics and our approach to triangulation
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Linguistic operationalization of complexity of voice personification
      • 4.2.1Procedure
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Corpus linguistic evidence related to the MINIMAL/COMPLEX binary classification
    • 5.2Linguistic differences between MINIMAL vs. COMPLEX descriptions of voices
      • 5.2.1Voice label types
      • 5.2.2Adjective collocate types
      • 5.2.3Verb collocate types
    • 5.3Exploring degrees of complexity through individual cases
      • 5.3.1The opposite ends of a scale of complexity of personification
      • 5.3.2Less clear-cut cases and the middle of a scale of complexity of personification
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 29 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21019.col
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