Tag Archives: elena semino

‘The McGill Pain Questionnaire: A Linguist’s View’ and ‘Language and Art of Trigeminal Neuralgia’

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On 29th June, I was invited to speak at the 2013 Conference of the UK Trigeminal Neuralgia Association, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Professor Joanna Zakrzewska, Facial Pain lead consultant at Eastman Dental Hospital in London. I gave two talks: ‘The McGill Pain Questionnaire: A Linguist’s View’ and ‘Language and Art of Trigeminal Neuralgia’ – the latter jointly with Professor Zakrzewska.

The first talk was aimed at health professionals and involved a corpus-based analysis of the descriptors for pain that are included in the McGill Pain Questionnaire, a widely used tool for the diagnosis of chronic pain. The findings of the work that has been carried out so far (in collaboration with Stuart Sharples, Applied Statistics) suggest that the linguistic behaviour of the descriptors in the English language generally may interfere with patients’ choices in ways that partly undermine the usefulness of the questionnaire. Further research may ultimately feed into the creation of a new version of the questionnaire. The second talk was aimed at both health professionals and sufferers, and involved a corpus-based analysis of patients’ and family carers’ accounts of their experiences of living with Trigeminal Neuralgia. The bulk of the data was drawn from the online forum of the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association. This work is particularly relevant to the goals of the Association, as it helps to achieve a greater acknowledgment and understanding of the views, challenges and needs of both sufferers and carers.

Elena Semino, Veronika Koller, and Zsófia Demjén investigating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths in interviews with hospice managers

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What is a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ death from the point of view of health professionals who work in hospices? As part of the CASS affiliated project ‘Metaphor in End of Life Care’ at Lancaster University  (funded by the Economic & Social Research Council), we tried to find out. We conducted interviews with 15 hospice managers based in the UK. Amongst other things, each interviewee was asked: ‘How would you describe a good and a bad death?’

Almost all interviewees stressed that different people will have different ideas about what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the experience of death. As a consequence, their own job involves finding out and fulfilling the wishes of patients and their families. The difference between good and bad deaths is partly expressed via contrasting metaphors.

To find out what they said, read the full post on the European Association for Palliative Care website. For more information on the project, visit the MELC website, http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/melc/.

Call for Participation: ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences

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We are very pleased to issue the first call for participation for our ESRC Summer School in Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences, which will take place at Lancaster University 16th-19th July 2013. This event takes place under the aegis of CASS, a new ESRC research centre bringing a new method in the study of language – the corpus approach – to a range of social sciences. CASS is investigating the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education.

Who can attend?

A crucial part of the CASS remit is to provide researchers across the social sciences with the skills needed to apply the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics to the research questions that matter in their own discipline. This event is aimed at junior social scientists – especially PhD students and postdoctoral researchers – in any of the social science disciplines. Anyone with an interest in the analysis of social issues via text and discourse – especially on a large scale – will find this summer school of interest.

Note: This summer school is aimed at beginners who have little or no experience using corpus tools in their work. Those  who have at least some introductory experience of analysis using language corpora, and who wish to expand their knowledge of key issues and techniques in cutting-edge corpus research, will be more interested in the UCREL Summer School in Corpus Linguistics.

Programme

The programme consists of a series of intensive two-hour sessions, some involving practical work, others more discussion-oriented. Topics include: Introduction to corpus linguistics; Corpus tools and techniques; Collecting corpus data; Foundational techniques for social science data – keywords and collocation; Understanding statistics for corpus analysis; Discourse analysis for the social sciences; Semantic annotation and key domains; Corpus-based approaches to metaphor in discourse; Pragmatics, politeness and impoliteness in the corpus. Speakers include Paul Baker, Jonathan Culpeper, and Elena Semino.

The CASS Summer School is part of three ‘Lancaster Summer Schools in Interdisciplinary Digital Methods’, see the website for further information. There are additional daily plenary lectures shared with the other two Summer School events, each illustrating cutting-edge digital research methods using corpus data. The confirmed plenary speakers are Tony McEnery, Ian Gregory, and Stephen Pumfrey.

How to apply

The CASS Summer School is free to attend, but registration in advance is compulsory, as places are limited. For more details, see the website.

New book: “Figurative Language, Genre and Register”

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Researchers investigating figurative language using corpora will find this new volume extremely helpful:

Deignan, A., Littlemore, J. & Semino, E. (2013) Figurative language, genre and register. Cambridge Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781107009431

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This book brings together discourse analysis and corpus linguistics in a cutting-edge study of figurative language in spoken and written discourse. The authors explore a diverse range of communities from chronic pain sufferers to nursery staff to present a detailed framework for the analysis of figurative language. The reader is shown how figurative language is used between members of these communities to construct their own ‘world view’, and how this can change with a shift in perspective – for example, when nursery staff are talking to each other about children in their care, and when they are communicating with the children’s parents. Figurative language is shown to be pervasive and inescapable, but it is also suggested that it varies significantly across genres. Hence, the use of figurative language can both help and hinder communication, especially when boundaries between genres and discourse communities are crossed.

Download a sample chapter or visit the Cambridge University Press page for author bios and information on ordering.