A computer-assisted study of the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life by patients, family carers and health professionals

Abstract

This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have also been criticized for their potentially negative implications. The use of innovative methodology enables us to undertake a more rigorous and systematic investigation of Violence metaphors than has previously been possible. Our findings show that patients, carers and professionals use a much wider set of Violence-related metaphors than noted in previous studies, and that metaphor use varies between interview and online forum genres and amongst different stakeholder groups. Our study has implications for the computer-assisted study of metaphor, metaphor theory and analysis more generally, and communication in healthcare settings.

Healthcare professionals' online use of violence metaphors for care at the end of life in the US: a corpus-based comparison with the UK

“…They are also in some cases positively appraised as being a fighter or a warrior. This is consistent with Demmen et al's (2015) The final frequent violent actor in Table 5 is the HEALTHCARE SYSTEM itself, who is positioned at a higher level of abstraction and is conceptualised as threatening, struggling with, or opposing improvements in CARE/TREATMENT. The palliative care professionals in our data also routinely refer to the healthcare system itself as broken, conceiving of their experiences within it as being in a war (see lines 22 and 23):…”

“…For the purposes of this analysis, we consider inflectionally related words together: e.g. the verb forms fight and fighting are considered together and referred to as "fight" metaphors (see also Demmen et al, 2015). For the most part, however, we keep derivationally related word forms separate where these might key different functional meanings (e.g.…”

What trajectors reveal about TIME metaphors

“…They represent less than 50 per cent of all the communication metaphors in her study. Some of the more recent advances in the field include Demmen et al's (2015) computer-assisted study of the use of violence metaphors, Johansson Falck's (2010Falck's ( , 2012aFalck's ( , 2012bFalck's ( , 2013 and Johansson Falck & Gibbs' (2012) combined corpus-based analyses and psycholinguistic surveys. The latter show that metaphorical language is also structured by conceptual mappings that involve people's embodied experiences of specific source domain concepts (Section 2).…”

Metaphor, discourse dynamics and register: applications to written descriptions of mental health problems

“…1 Introduction has investigated how metaphors are influenced by the discourse activities in which they are used (e.g. Cameron 2010; Deignan et al 2013;Demmen et al 2015;Semino et al 2017). Discursive approaches to metaphor have largely grown out of the difficulties researchers faced when applying conceptual metaphor theory to real-world data (for an edited collection on these issues, see Zanotto et al 2008).…”

“…Although recent research by metaphor scholars has begun to explore the discursive functions of metaphor (Koller 2003;Deignan et al 2013;Demmen et al 2015;Semino et al 2017), the majority of metaphor studies within the field of health largely focus on metaphors as a device to represent illness experiences. Using a description of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) written by a participant with the disorder as a case study, we aim to demonstrate that metaphors used in extended descriptions of OCD do not merely serve as a representation of experiences but that they also construct an identity as a person with OCD, create a persuasive piece of writing and provide the text with structure.…”