Metaphors of a conflicted self in the journals of Sylvia Plath

This paper presents some of the results of a study that aims to investigate how mental states can be conveyed linguistically in texts of a personal nature. Figurative language, in particular metaphor and metonymy, are generally understood to play an important role in the expression of such complex phenomena (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Kövecses, 2000; Meier and Robinson, 2005). The study therefore looks at the metaphors used to convey mental states in the Smith Journal of ‘The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath’. Mental state here refers to various aspects of cognitive functioning, but the focus, in particular, is on mental states of affect i.e. those mental states that are intrinsically valenced (Ortony and Turner, 1990). Sylvia Plath’s journal provides particularly rich data due to the writer’s linguistic creativity and documented mental health issues, the experience of which she continually explores. Specifically then, this paper focuses on metaphors of motion (or lack thereof) and so called split self metaphors. Both manual intensive analysis and automated corpus methodologies are employed in the investigation: the Wmatrix corpus tool (Rayson, 2009) is used to identify semantic fields that are potential source and target domains in order to obtain a comprehensive picture of metaphor use. In depth analysis is then conducted manually on a sample of journal entries. The MIP procedure (Pragglejaz, 2007) is used for metaphor identification, and interpretations draw on research in other fields, especially psychology, on representations of affect. Metaphors of mental state are analyzed in terms of their implications for conveying a sense of intensity, valency and creativity

‘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

Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics

Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants’ understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomization) can increase patients’ cognitive load when reading text. There is a need to systematically examine the language demands of IC documents, including whether the processes intended to safeguard patients by providing clear information might do the opposite through complex, inaccessible language. Therefore, the goal of this study is to build an open-access corpus of patient information sheets (PIS) and consent forms (CF) and analyze each genre using an interdisciplinary approach to capture multidimensional measures of language quality beyond traditional readability measures. A search of publicly-available online IC documents for UK-based cancer RCTs (2000-17) yielded corpora of 27 PIS and 23 CF. Textual analysis using the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, revealed different linguistic dimensions relating to the complexity of IC documents, particularly low word concreteness for PIS and low referential and deep cohesion for CF, although both had high narrativity. Key part-of-speech analyses using Wmatrix corpus software revealed a contrast between the overrepresentation of the pronoun ‘you’ plus modal verbs in PIS and ‘I’ in CF, exposing the contradiction inherent in conveying uncertainty to patients using tentative language in PIS while making them affirm certainty in their understanding in CF

Pro-vaccination personal narratives in response to online hesitancy about the HPV vaccine: The challenge of tellability

Experimental studies have shown that narratives can be effective persuasive tools in addressing vaccine hesitancy, including regarding the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is transmitted via sexual contact and can cause cervical cancer. This paper presents an analysis of a thread from the online parenting forum Mumsnet Talk where an initially undecided Original Poster is persuaded to vaccinate their child against HPV by a respondent’s narrative of cervical cancer that they describe as difficult to share. This paper considers this particular narrative alongside all other narratives that precede the decision announced on the Mumsnet thread. It shows how producing pro-vaccination narratives about HPV involves challenges regarding ‘tellability’ – what makes the events in a narrative reportable or worth telling. We suggest that this has implications for the context-dependent nature of tellability, the role of parenting forums in vaccination-related discussions, and narrative-based communication about vaccinations more generally

What is a ‘good death’? Narratives, metaphors and professional identities in interviews with hospice managers

In this presentation we discuss the metaphors and narratives that fifteen hospice managers produced during semi-structured interviews in response to the following questions: ‘How would you describe a good death? Can you provide any examples from your experience?’ Metaphor involves talking and, potentially, thinking about one thing in terms of another. It is often used to communicate about experiences that are subjective, complex and sensitive, including the emotions around death (e.g. Kövecses 2000). As part of an ESRC-funded project on ‘Metaphor in End-of-Life Care’, we apply a well-established analytical method (Pragglejaz Group 2007) in order to identify the metaphors that were used by several interviewees in order to describe the characteristics of a good death. These include: metaphors to do with freedom and control (‘pain-free’, ‘their symptoms are under control’); metaphors to do with openness (‘open discussions’); metaphors to do with vision (‘what the patient sees as a good death’); and a variety of metaphors to do with journeys (‘at peace with the journey as it’s going’, ‘reached an understanding that the death is going to come’, ‘went down quite quickly’). When interviewees told stories about specific cases, they produced what we call ‘narratives of successful intervention’ which, in Labov’s (2010) terms, have the following characteristics: a lengthy orientation phase which outlines a problematic situation; a narrative core in which the problems are successfully addressed by hospice staff; a brief reference to the person’s death; and a wealth of evaluation devices, often clustering towards the end of the story. We discuss the ways in which these metaphors and narratives are linked to the interviewees’ professional views, challenges and identities

Emotional Implications of Metaphor:Consequences of Metaphor Framing for Mindset about Cancer

When faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person’s cancer situation as a “battle” encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a “journey” does. Conversely, the “journey” frame is more likely to encourage the inference that the person can make peace with their situation than the “battle” frame. We rule out lexical priming as an explanation for this effect and examine the generalizability of these findings to individual differences across participants and to a different type of hardship—namely, an experience with depression. Finally, we examine the language participants produced after encountering one of these metaphors, and we find tendencies to repeat and extend the metaphors encountered. Together, these experiments shed light on the influential role of linguistic metaphor in the way we emotionally appraise hardship situations

A linguistic approach to the psychosis continuum: (dis)similarities and (dis)continuities in how clinical and non-clinical voice-hearers talk about their voices

Introduction: “Continuum” approaches to psychosis have generated reports of similarities and differences in voice-hearing in clinical and non-clinical populations at the cohort level, but not typically examined overlap or degrees of difference between groups. Methods: We used a computer-aided linguistic approach to explore reports of voice-hearing by a clinical group (Early Intervention in Psychosis service-users; N = 40) and a non-clinical group (spiritualists; N = 27). We identify semantic categories of terms statistically overused by one group compared with the other, and by each group compared to a control sample of non-voice-hearing interview data (log likelihood (LL) value 6.63+=p < .01; effect size measure: log ratio 1.0+). We consider whether individual values support a continuum model. Results: Notwithstanding significant cohort-level differences, there was considerable continuity in language use. Reports of negative affect were prominent in both groups (p < .01, log ratio: 1.12+). Challenges of cognitive control were also evident in both cohorts, with references to “disengagement” accentuated in service-users (p < .01, log ratio: 1.14+). Conclusion: A corpus linguistic approach to voice-hearing provides new evidence of differences between clinical and non-clinical groups. Variability at the individual level provides substantial evidence of continuity with implications for cognitive mechanisms underlying voice-hearing

Narratives, Information and Manifestations of Resistance to Persuasion in Online Discussions of HPV Vaccination

There are both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence for the fact that, in health communication, narratives (story telling) may have a persuasive advantage when compared with information (the provision of facts). The dominant explanation for this potential advantage is that narratives inhibit people’s resistance to persuasion, particularly in the form of counterarguing. Evidence in this area to date has most often been gathered through lab or field experiments. In the current study we took a novel approach, gathering our data from naturally-occurring, non-experimental and organically evolving online interactions about vaccinations. We focus on five threads from the parenting forum Mumsnet Talk that centered on indecision about the HPV vaccination. Our analysis revealed that narratives and information were used by posters in similar quantities as a means of providing vaccination-related advice. We also found similar frequencies of direct engagement with both narratives and information. However, our findings showed that narratives resulted in a significantly higher proportion of posts exhibiting supportive engagement, whereas information resulted in posts exhibiting a significantly higher proportion of challenges, including counterarguing and other manifestations of posters’ resistance to persuasion. The proportions of supportive versus challenging engagement also varied depending on the topic and vaccine stance of narratives. Notwithstanding contextual explanations for these patterns, our findings, based on this original approach of using naturalistic data, provide a novel kind of evidence for the potential of narratives to inhibit counterarguing in authentic health-related discourse

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

The book Henry’s Demons (2011) recounts the events surrounding Henry Cockburn’s diagnosis of schizophrenia from the alternating perspectives of Henry himself and his father Patrick. In this paper we present a detailed linguistic analysis of Henry’s first-person accounts of experiences that could be described as auditory verbal hallucinations. We first provide a typology of Henry’s 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

Introduction: Metaphor and Language

It is difficult to overstate the importance of metaphor in human language(s), thought and experience. Over centuries of scholarship and a period of particularly intense focus in the last four decades, metaphor has been defined, theorized and applied in many different and sometimes mutually incompatible ways. Nonetheless, a fairly broad consensus exists that metaphor involves the perception of similarities or correspondences between unlike entities and processes, so that we can see, experience, think and communicate about one thing in terms of another – our lives as journeys, our minds as machines, our emotions as external forces, people as animals, inanimate objects as people, and so on. This expands our ability to feel, reason and communicate in ways that are characteristically human