Title: The Language of Pain
Subtitle: Expression or description?
Series Title: Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 9
Publisher: John Benjamins
Author: Chryssoula Lascaratou
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027238962 Pages: 255 Price: Europe EURO 105.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9789027238962 Pages: 255 Price: U.S. $ 142.00
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 construal of pain in everyday language. This work is based on a specialised electronic corpus of Greek naturally-occurring dialogues in a health care context, the underlying assumption being that in the absence of factual evidence intuition about language cannot reliably detect or predict patterns of usage. Comparing Greek with English data, this book significantly contributes to the development of this research field cross-linguistically.