Health Discourses

How can descriptions of illnesses affect how we understand and treat them? Which language choices do people make when discussing and representing health conditions? What does the way people talk about health tell us about how they think about it? These questions are central to an increasing body of linguistic research, which aims to examine the foundational interactions between language, health and society. This edited collection explores a wide range of health-related text types and discourse contexts, including literary fiction, autobiography, poetry, press coverage, and video diaries. By examining the most salient stylistic features of these texts – including their use of metaphor, transitivity, narrative structure, framing, and ‘mind style’ – via a wide variety of stylistic methods, including cognitive- and corpus-based approaches, this collection explores the ways in which language can shape and reshape ideas about health. Collectively, these explorations form an overview of a fast-emerging yet thus far fragmented field of study. Showcasing the latest research from both established and emerging stylisticians, the chapters in this collection also demonstrate how stylistics can provide unique insights for health-related research by shining a light on the ways in which language is implicated both in our experience and our perception of illness, and the key role of language in determining how health-related matters are diagnosed, managed, and treated.