Zsofia Demjen

The online use of Violence and Journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals: a mixed methods study

Objective To compare the frequencies with which patients with cancer and health professionals use Violence and Journey metaphors when writing online; and to investigate the use of these metaphors by patients with cancer, in view of critiques of war-related metaphors for cancer and the adoption of the notion of the ‘cancer journey’ in UK policy documents. Design Computer-assisted quantitative and qualitative study of two data sets totalling 753 302 words. Setting A UK-based online forum for patients with cancer (500 134 words) and a UK-based website for health professionals (253 168 words). Participants 56 patients with cancer writing online between 2007 and 2012; and 307 health professionals writing online between 2008 and 2013. Results Patients with cancer use both Violence metaphors and Journey metaphors approximately 1.5 times per 1000 words to describe their illness experience. In similar online writing, health professionals use each type of metaphor significantly less frequently. Patients’ Violence metaphors can express and reinforce negative feelings, but they can also be used in empowering ways. Journey metaphors can express and reinforce positive feelings, but can also be used in disempowering ways. Conclusions Violence metaphors are not by default negative and Journey metaphors are not by default a positive means of conceptualising cancer. A blanket rejection of Violence metaphors and an uncritical promotion of Journey metaphors would deprive patients of the positive functions of the former and ignore the potential pitfalls of the latter. Instead, greater awareness of the function (empowering or disempowering) of patients’ metaphor use can lead to more effective communication about the experience of cancer.

'Good' and 'bad' deaths: Narratives and professional identities in interviews with hospice managers

This article explores the formal and functional characteristics of narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths as they were told by 13 UK-based hospice managers in the course of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees’ responses include a variety of remarkably consistent ‘narratives of successful/frustrated intervention’, which exhibit distinctive formal characteristics in terms of the starting point and core of the action, the choice of personal pronouns and metaphors, and the ways in which positive and negative evaluation is expressed. In functional terms, the hospice managers’ narratives play an important role in representing and constructing their professional views, challenges and identities. Overall, the narratives argue for the role of hospices and professional hospice staff in facilitating a ‘good’ death, and, by presenting a relatively unified view, may potentially preclude alternative perspectives.

Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life:A Corpus-based Study

© 2018 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. This book presents the methodology, findings and implications of a large-scale corpus-based study of the metaphors used to talk about cancer and the end of life (including care at the end of life) in the UK. It focuses on metaphor as a central linguistic and cognitive tool that is frequently used to talk and think about sensitive and subjective experiences, such as illness, emotions, death, and dying, and that can both help and hinder communication and well-being, depending on how it is used. The book centers on a combination of qualitative analyses and innovative corpus linguistic methods. This methodological assemblage was applied to the systematic study of the metaphors used in a 1.5-million-word corpus. The corpus consists of interviews with, and online forum posts written by, members of three stakeholder groups, namely: patients diagnosed with advanced cancer; unpaid carers looking after a relative with a diagnosis of advanced cancer; and healthcare professionals. The book presents a range of qualitative and quantitative findings that have implications for: metaphor theory and analysis; corpus linguistic and computational approaches to metaphor; and training and practice in cancer care and hospice, palliative and end-of-life care.

Henry's voices: the representation of auditory verbal hallucinations in an autobiographical narrative

The book Henrys Demons (2011) recounts the events surrounding Henry Cockburns diagnosis of schizophrenia from the alternating perspectives of Henry himself and his father Patrick. In this paper, we present a detailed linguistic analysis of Henrys first-person accounts of experiences that could be described as auditory verbal hallucinations. We first provide a typology of Henrys voices, taking into account who or what is presented as speaking, what kinds of utterances they produce and any salient stylistic features of these utterances. We then discuss the linguistically distinctive ways in which Henry represents these voices in his narrative. We focus on the use of Direct Speech as opposed to other forms of speech presentation, the use of the sensory verbs hear and feel and the use of ‘non-factive’ expressions such as I thought and as if. We show how different linguistic representations may suggest phenomenological differences between the experience of hallucinatory voices and the perception of voices that other people can also hear. We, therefore, propose that linguistic analysis is ideally placed to provide in-depth accounts of the phenomenology of voice hearing and point out the implications of this approach for clinical practice and mental healthcare.

Metaphor, impoliteness, and offence in online communication

What role might figurative language play in utterances that are designed to threaten or cause offence? In this chapter we tackle this question, against the backdrop of social practices around computer-mediated communication (CMC), by combining evidence in metaphor and impoliteness research. This combination is necessary because of the relative absence of studies investigating the role of metaphor in offence more broadly.