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Last update:
9 February 2010

© John Benjamins
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The Language of Pain

Expression or description?

Chryssoula Lascaratou
University of Athens

Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 9

2007. xii, 238 pp.
Publishing status: Available

Hardbound – In stock
978 90 272 3896 2 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00
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978 90 272 9205 6 / EUR 105.00 / USD 158.00
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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.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
xi–xii
Chapter 1. Introduction
1–8
Chapter 2. Pain and language
9–29
2.1. Introduction
9
2.2. The language of pain
13
Chapter 3. Corpus design and data collection
31–44
Chapter 4. Mode of analysis
37
4.1. Introduction
37
4.2. Halliday's process types in modelling experience
38
Chapter 5. Data analysis and general discussion
45–57
5.1. Introduction
45
5.2. Pain: Process, participant or quality?
45
5.3. Key lexical items and their frequencies
50
Chapter 6. The construal of pain as process
59–101
6.1. Introduction
59
6.2. Foolen's account of the communication of emotions and pain behaviour
59
6.3. General characteristics of pain as process
61
6.4. Process types and structural functions in ponao constructions
73
Chapter 7. The construal of pain as thing-participant
103–132
7.1. Introduction
103
7.2. Grammatically construed semantic properties of ponos
104
7.3. Structural configurations featuring ponos as participant
124
Chapter 8. Pain and metaphor
133–181
8.1. Introduction
133
8.2. The conceptual grounding of ponos metaphors and their linguistic realisation
139
8.3. Lost for words
174
8.4. Concluding remarks
178
Chapter 9. Conclusions
183–196
References
197–205
Appendix A
207–213
Appendix B
215–218
Appendix C
219–232
Name index
233–234
Subject index
235–237

“Chryssoula Lascaratou’s book on pain language is a wonderful achievement. It synthesizes several different approaches in an attempt to understand the conceptual patterns underlying pain-related expressions in Greek. She is aware that no single approach can come to terms with the bewildering complexities of this universal phenomenon. She successfully integrates Halliday’s functional grammar with cognitive grammar and semantics, a bottom-up and a top-down methodology, and linguistics with philosophy. The result is a thorough, penetrating, and beautifully complex study of human suffering.”
Zoltán Kövecses, Professor of Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

Subject classification

Linguistics
Cognition and language
Cognitive linguistics
Functional linguistics
Theoretical linguistics