ObjectiveTo compare the frequencies with which patients with cancer and health professionals use Violence and Journey metaphors when writing online; and to investigate the use of these metaphors by patients with cancer, in view of critiques of war-related metaphors for cancer and the adoption of the notion of the ‘cancer journey’ in UK policy documents.DesignComputer-assisted quantitative and qualitative study of two data sets totalling 753 302 words.SettingA UK-based online forum for patients with cancer (500 134 words) and a UK-based website for health professionals (253 168 words).Participants56 patients with cancer writing online between 2007 and 2012; and 307 health professionals writing online between 2008 and 2013.ResultsPatients with cancer use both Violence metaphors and Journey metaphors approximately 1.5 times per 1000 words to describe their illness experience. In similar online writing, health professionals use each type of metaphor significantly less frequently. Patients’ Violence metaphors can express and reinforce negative feelings, but they can also be used in empowering ways. Journey metaphors can express and reinforce positive feelings, but can also be used in disempowering ways.ConclusionsViolence metaphors are not by default negative and Journey metaphors are not by default a positive means of conceptualising cancer. A blanket rejection of Violence metaphors and an uncritical promotion of Journey metaphors would deprive patients of the positive functions of the former and ignore the potential pitfalls of the latter. Instead, greater awareness of the function (empowering or disempowering) of patients’ metaphor use can lead to more effective communication about the experience of cancer.
This article investigates the functions of the colour pink as a marker of gender and sexuality in cultural models and the multimodal texts they inform. To this end, tendencies suggested by a pilot survey on colour associations are traced in a number of visual texts such as leaflets, advertisements, websites and magazines, where pink functions to gender textual referents, attract female readers' attention and index both sexuality and sexual identity. Both informants' associations and the multimodal text analysis show evidence of an emergent schema that relates pink to post-feminist femininity. This is seen as complementing and extending conventional and counter-cultural associations of pink with stereotypically feminine characteristics or gayness, respectively. Ultimately, the author argues for an approach to colour that combines social semiotics with cognitive semantics.
This study combines quantitative semi-automated corpus methods with manual qualitative analysis to investigate the use of Violence metaphors for cancer and end of life in a 1,500,000-word corpus of data from three stakeholder groups in healthcare: patients, family carers and healthcare professionals. Violence metaphors in general, especially military metaphors, are conventionally used to talk about illness, particularly cancer. However, they have also been criticized for their potentially negative implications. The use of innovative methodology enables us to undertake a more rigorous and systematic investigation of Violence metaphors than has previously been possible. Our findings show that patients, carers and professionals use a much wider set of Violence-related metaphors than noted in previous studies, and that metaphor use varies between interview and online forum genres and amongst different stakeholder groups. Our study has implications for the computer-assisted study of metaphor, metaphor theory and analysis more generally, and communication in healthcare settings.
reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. By contrast, cognitive metaphor research has recently developed to emphasize the embodied, i.e. neural, origins of metaphor at the expense of its sociodiscursive impact. This article takes up the concept of social cognition, arguing that it organizes the modification of, and access to, cognitive resources, with metaphoric models playing a particularly salient role in the constitution of ideology. In a cyclical process, ideology will help particular models gain prominence in discourse, which will, in turn, impact on cognition. To illustrate the point, the article draws on an extensive corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions, showing how that particular discourse centres on an ideologically vested metaphoric model of evolutionary struggle. K E Y W O R D S : business media discourse, CDA, cognitive linguistics, metaphor, social cognition A RT I C L E 199Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse Downloaded from discourse and, by extension, metaphor as constitutive of sociocultural relations, one of the clearest manifestations of power is the possibility to control discourse and hence cognition, e.g. by 'a coherent network of [metaphoric] entailments that highlight some features of reality and hide others' (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 157). The empirical analysis will show how such metaphoric entailment is reflected in chains across texts. It is this early, rather critical approach to the social and cognitive aspects of metaphor that led Eubanks (2000: 25) to rightly state that the 'connection between the cognitive and the cultural is the greatest strength of cognitive metaphor theory'. However, critical views on sociocultural aspects of metaphor seem to have waned significantly in cognitive semantics; although the notion of metaphor being socioculturally grounded never quite disappears in the literature, it seems to be pushed to the background. This development continues in more recent cognitive accounts of metaphor. Whereas Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 156-63) still elaborate on the reasons why metaphors are used for selective representation, Grady et al. (1999: para. 33) state only that 'what started out [. . .] as some individual's [. . .] conceptual achievement has become a shared, entrenched conceptualization, presumably because [it] proved successful for some purpose ' (1999: para. 72). Yet, what exactly that purpose might be is not included in the authors' summary of cognitive metaphor theory's agenda. Thus, integrated critical and cognitive research into metaphor is also 'an area that warrants much greater exploration' (Eubanks, 2000: 25). Clearly, investigating the origins and structures of metaphor, but not the effects and purposes of metaphor usage is only half the story, and approaches like the neuro...
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