Researching Language and Health

Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at University College London. Her main research interests are language and discourses around illness, with recent projects focusing on depression, psychosis, cancer, and vaccinations. She uses a range of analytical tools including discourse, metaphor, narrative, and corpus analysis. Sarah Atkins is Teaching and Research Fellow at Aston University with research interests in language and communication in professional contexts. She has worked on a number of projects within healthcare and health education, with a focus on the practical relevance of findings for practitioners. Elena Semino is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She specializes in health communication, medical humanities, corpus linguistics, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis.

Acknowledgements; Part I; 1. Introduction to Researching Language and Health; 2. Getting started with research: questions, data, methods; 3. Ethics in health and language research; Part II; 4. Agency, responsibility and risk in public health communication; 5. Literary representations of illness and public perceptions; 6. Negotiating relationships and identities in spoken healthcare interactions; 7. Digital technologies and health talk online; 8. Digital health communication and the lived experience of illness; Part III; 9. Medical advertising and medicalization – a multimodal critical discourse analysis; 10. Metaphors and Covid-19 in 2020; 11. Vaccination narratives in response to hesitancy online; 12. Authenticity and medical communication skills training; 13. Storytelling and affiliation amongst healthcare professionals; Index