The language of pain in Vietnamese

Abstract

Pain is broadly defined as " […] an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage" (Merskey & Bogduk, 1994, p. 250). With language being a key channel through which pain is expressed, there is now a growing body of research exploring the language of pain from various perspectives. Nonetheless, while a substantial number of the studies have focused principally on lexis and its application in clinical settings, only a few have attempted to portray how pain is profiled by wider aspects of language, including metaphor, using an established framework. Moreover, while pain language has been investigated in different languages, with the strongest focus on English, Vietnamese pain language has been scarcely examined.This study explores the language of pain in Vietnamese, with a focus on providing an interdisciplinary view on Vietnamese pain language, ranging from lexicology, semantics, and functional grammar to conceptual metaphor as part of cognitive semantics. Specifically, the study aims to investigate Vietnamese pain terms and pain descriptors, and then determine to what extent the Vietnamese equivalents of the pain descriptors from Melzack's (1975) standard McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ), known as the most authoritative pain assessment instrument based on language, are used by the Vietnamese patients. The study also treats the functional grammar of pain in Vietnamese, using the established framework of Halliday (1998), and explores Vietnamese conceptual metaphors of pain, using the schemata of Talmy (1988) and Kövecses (2000Kövecses ( , 2010.These framework and schemata have been validated by pain language research in languages such as English and Greek.The data of the study was collected from semi-structured interviews with 26 Vietnamese women with cancer who were recruited from a large hospital in Vietnam. An interview protocol was designed to generate informative responses from the participants. Content analysis was employed in three phases of the analytical process. The data was (1) transcribed, (2) coded, and (3)