Metaphors may present some challenges in cases of self-illness ambiguity, yet they remain necessary to access a person’s perspective on illness and her relationship with it. The paper outlines the main functions of metaphors (i.e., naming, framing, changing functions) to explain why they can be valuable tools for reducing self-illness ambiguity. First, metaphor is presented as a creative way for a patient to (re)claim her ‘self’ through her own speaker’s meaning. Metaphor is not merely a way to name internal processes (...) and make them more communicable to others (compactness and inexpressibility theses), but primarily a way to represent what the mental illness means for herself (for-me-ness thesis). Second, particularly when extended in mental health narratives, metaphor can frame a person’s experiences of illness by offering a specific affective perspective for self-understanding (perspectivalness thesis). Third, the changing function of metaphor offers a new perspective on the experience of self-illness ambiguity in the narrative, allowing to look at the relationship with the illness, without fully identifying with it. The metaphorical functions can facilitate the discovery of new forms of affective coherence in a person’s mental health narrative and serve as crucial tools for clinicians’ understanding in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

This work analyzes the conceptual metaphors of depression in a corpus of 23 blogs written in Catalan by people suffering major depressive disorder. Its main aim was comparative, in order to check w...

The aim of the paper is to determine how salient and non-salient figurative discourse nouns affect readers’ default response processing and oculo-graphic (eye-movement) reactions. Whereas the theories of the Graded Salience and the Defaultness Hypotheses, developed by R. Giora (Giora, 1999, 2003; Giora, Givoni, & Fein, 2015), have stimulated further research in the area of interpretive salience (Giora et al., 2015; Giora, Jaffe, Becker & Fein, 2018), the resonating influence of syntactic salience on default interpretations has been largely neglected. In (...) this study we provide corpus-based evidence followed by eye-tracking experiment verification, supportive of the synchronized influence of syntactic and lexical salience. The results show that default figurative responses in lexically salient positions may require more cognitive effort (longer fixations) if they are syntactically less salient. Literal responses to figurative nouns may also result from either weak lexical or syntactic salience of nouns. Therefore, apart from exemplifying resonance with lexical salience (in terms of lexical frequency, familiarity, conventionality, and prototypicality), the default figurative interpretations are also syntactically dependent. (shrink)

Pastarąjį dešimtmetį vis daugiau atliekama mokslinių tarpdalykinių tyrimų. Šiame darbe bandoma pažvelgti, kaip metaforomis kalboje reiškiamos depresijos sukeltos emocijos ir jausmai. Jautrus ligos diskursas yra būtent ta sritis, kurioje metaforai tenka labai svarbus vaidmuo. Depresija priskiriama prie labai subjektyvios, jautrios ir abstrakčios patirties ir yra labai dažnai pacientų konceptualizuojama metaforiškai. Šio tyrimo tikslas yra atskleisti, kaip moterys konceptualizuoja depresiją ir jos simptomus Lietuvos socialinių tinklų diskurse. Tyrimas atliktas remiantis kritinės metaforos analizės metodu. Tyrimo duomenys rinkti iš sergančiųjų depresija internetinio bendravimo (...) svetainių ir socialinių tinklų grupių. Sudarytas 22 694 žodžių tekstynas ir identifikuoti 184 metaforiniai pasakymai, kurie buvo susieti su konceptualiosiomis metaforomis. Tyrimo rezultatai rodo, kad dažniausiai pasitaikančios depresiją apibūdinančios metaforos yra talpyklos grupės metaforos. Taip pat pastebima tendencija metaforizuoti daugybę depresijos simptomų, tarp kurių metaforiškai dažniausiai suvokiamas nerimas. (shrink)