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BIO
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 specializes in health communication, medical humanities, corpus linguistics, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis. She has (co-)authored over 100 academic publications, including: Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (Routledge, 2018). Her research has been funded by UK Research and Innovation, the British Academy, the National Institute for Health Research and the Wellcome Trust.
Further information:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/elena-semino
Metaphor and illness
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 discuss the metaphors used in communication about three different health conditions: schizophrenia, cancer and Covid-19. I show how in all three cases metaphors are exploited creatively for a range of purposes, including emotional disclosure, persuasion and reconceptualization. I also consider the practical implications and applications of the insights of metaphor analysis for health communication in clinical and public health settings.
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Contact
linguistics.research.seminars@gmail.com
PID 041/2022-2023
PID ID2022/085
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