The Language of Pain. Expression or description?

Abstract

How is the universal, yet private and subjective, experience of pain talked about by different people in everyday encounters? What does the analysis of pain-related lexico-phraseological choices, grammatical structures, and linguistic metaphors reveal as to how pain is perceived and experienced? Are pain utterances primarily used to express or to describe this experiential domain? This is the first book that investigates such questions from both a functional and a cognitive perspective: it combines two converging usage-based theoretical models in a systematic linguistic inquiry of the construa. The Language of Pain; Editorial page; Title page; LCC data; Dedication; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Pain and language; 3. Corpus design and data collection; 4. Mode of analysis; 5. Data analysis and general discussion; 6. The construal of pain as process; 7. The construal of pain as thing-participant; 8. Pain and metaphor; 9. Conclusions; References; Appendix A: Pain as process; Appendix B: Pain as thing; Appendix C; Name index; Subject index; The series Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research.