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

The use of Violence metaphors in healthcare has long been criticised as detrimental to patients. Recent work (Demmen et al., 2015; Semino et al., 2015) has combined qualitative analysis with corpus-based quantitative methods to analyse the frequency and variety of Violence metaphors in the language of UK-based patients, family carers, and healthcare professionals talking about cancer and/or end-of-life care. A new, 250,324-word corpus of US health professionals’ online discourse has been collected to add a contrastive, cross-cultural element to the study of metaphors in end-of-life care. In this work, we move towards a replicable method for comparing frequency and type of Violence metaphors in UK and US contexts by making use of both search-and-recall and key semantic tag analysis in the corpus query tool Wmatrix. First, we discuss the most overused and underused semantic domains in the US corpus as compared with the pre-existing UK corpus of online healthcare professional discourse. Second, we show that there are no notable frequency differences in the occurrence of Violence metaphors in the two corpora, but we point out some differences in the topics that these metaphors are used to discuss. Third, we introduce a novel framework for analysing agency in Violence metaphors and apply it to the US corpus. This reveals the variety of relationships, concerns and challenges that these metaphors can express. Throughout, we relate our findings to the different US and UK cultural and institutional contexts, and reflect on the methodological implications of our approach for corpus-based metaphor analysis

The Language of Harm: What the Nassar Victim Impact Statements Reveal About Abuse and Accountability

This Article examines 148 Victim Impact Statements that were delivered to thecourt in the Larry Nassar criminal sentencing. Larry Nassar was a doctor for theUnited States Gymnastics Association and an employee of Michigan State Universitywho treated elite athletes, predominantly gymnasts. Nassar pleaded guilty to childpornography and first-degree criminal sexual misconduct charges in Michigan. Hissentencing received worldwide attention as victims delivered impact statementsdescribing the harm and betrayal of his conduct. Using corpus-based discourseanalysis, this Article examines the complex strategies that the victims deployed todescribe who Nassar was (a doctor, a monster, a friend), what he did (abuse, assault,pedophilia, “treatments”), and the harms that they suffered (pain, hurt, betrayal). Itconcludes by recommending more robust and holistic approaches to the naming andframing of sexual assault, more proactive policy uses of Victim Impact Statements inshaping systemic reforms, and greater law reforms to prevent systemic institutionalsexual assault

At Arm's Length: Methods of Investigating Constructions of the 'Other' in American Disaster and Disease Reporting.

This thesis is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of social actor construal in media discourse of major American press publications, 1981-2009. Analysis is based upon two custom-collected corpora: a 36,736,679-word corpus of reporting on Hurricane Katrina, spanning approximately one year of coverage; and a 161,144,924-word corpus of AIDS/HIV reporting, published over the course of nearly three decades. I detail common attribution, argumentation, and predication strategies associated with the most frequent nomination strategies in both corpora, as well as investigating construal via topoi and metaphorical representation of actors and actions. Matched analyses are performed over the course of the thesis, enabling me to: a) uncover common characteristics of discourses of moral panic and risk society in both Katrina and AIDS/HIV reporting, and b) refine a generalizable method of analysing high-frequency items in large corpora varying in word count, diachrony, and topicality. To this end, I propose a reproducible method of downsampling results called proportional semantic collocation, by which a researcher might quantitatively determine salient categories of semantic preference for a given search term, and use these indicators for close, qualitative analysis. In close analyses of my corpora, shared discursive strategies and representation patterns characterised both people affected by Katrina and people with AIDS. These included: nearly total lack of agency; the construal of threat to the in-group, e.g. through the topos of numbers; and highly frequent association with additional othered groups (or 'deviancy doubling'). An additional pattern noted throughout the thesis has been identified as 'social sequestering', or a segregation of certain othered groups into risk or moral panic categories, typified by discourses creating distance or dissuading reader identification with these groups. In this way, major American newspaper publications are found to perpetuate an us/them dichotomy, encouraging social distance to protect the majority group from social panic

Cancer as a metaphor

Since the publication of Susan Sontag’s highly influential  Illness as Metaphor in 1978,  many studies have provided follow-up analyses on her critique of metaphors for cancer, but none have investigated her claims about the uses and implications of cancer  as a metaphor (e.g., the cancer of corruption), and her prediction that medical advances would make this metaphor obsolete. In this article, we present the first systematic study of cancer as a metaphor in contemporary English. We show the forms, frequencies, and functions of 925 metaphorical uses of cancer-related vocabulary in two large English language corpora, and discuss their implications for: (a) the framing of the phenomena that are most frequently described as cancers and of potential courses of action to be taken in relation to these phenomena; (b) perceptions of cancer itself; and (c) theoretical accounts of what makes a metaphor successful, in terms of its effectiveness and its applicability to a wide range of topics. In this way, we provide detailed evidence, and additional nuance, for Sontag’s critique of cancer as a metaphor and put forward an explanation for the current persistence of this metaphor, despite its controversial status

The language of harm: what the Nassar victim impact statements reveal about abuse and accountability

This Article examines 148 Victim Impact Statements that were delivered to the court in the Larry Nassar criminal sentencing. Larry Nassar was a doctor for the United States Gymnastics Association and an employee of Michigan State University who treated elite athletes, predominantly gymnasts. Nassar pleaded guilty to child pornography and first-degree criminal sexual misconduct charges in Michigan. His sentencing received worldwide attention as victims delivered impact statements describing the harm and betrayal of his conduct. Using corpus-based discourse analysis, this Article examines the complex strategies that the victims deployed to describe who Nassar was (a doctor, a monster, a friend), what he did (abuse, assault, pedophilia, “treatments”), and the harms that they suffered (pain, hurt, betrayal). It concludes by recommending more robust and holistic approaches to the naming and framing of sexual assault, more proactive policy uses of Victim Impact Statements in shaping systemic reforms, and greater law reforms to prevent systemic institutional sexual assault

Super, social, medical: Person-first and identity-first representations of disabled people in Australian newspapers, 2000–2019

This paper provides an interdisciplinary, corpus-based study of naming practices for disabled people in a collection of Australian newspaper articles spanning 20 years. We analyse head nouns, modifiers, and coordinating structures for both person-first and identity-first language, drawing on social actor analysis as well as previously-identified models of media representation. Overall, we find similar usage of both naming practices with respect to the types of social actors that occur, the categorisations of disabilities that are referenced, and the associations that are established, with only minor differences. Additionally, both naming practices are strongly associated with the medical and social pathology models of media representation, which emphasise disadvantage, with almost a total absence of ‘progressive’ models, which represent people as multifaceted agents. We conclude by emphasising the need for the news media to incorporate the voices and preferences of disabled people themselves

Regulating services

No abstract available