Corpus methodology and discursive conceptualizations of depression

TY - CHAP

T1 - Corpus methodology and discursive conceptualizations of depression

AU - Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard

PY - 2020/5/1

Y1 - 2020/5/1

N2 - Depression still has taboo status in many societies, and is not something people can talk readily and openly about. This is, needless to say, a problem to many people who suffer from depression, as it means that – other than mental health professionals – they have very few people to talk to about their illness. This is problematic because understanding how people with depression conceptualize the illness could be valuable in many ways, and one way to identify such conceptualizations is through analysis of texts on depression by people with depression. Fortunately, the Internet offers a way for people with depression to talk about the illness in the form of blogging, providing a plethora of data. So many, in fact, that corpus-methodology is preferred over traditional qualitative close-reading. This chapter presents a corpus-linguistic case study of a corpus of blog posts about depression. In applying some corpus-linguistic methods, the study aims to identify common patterns of language use within corpus and illustrates how salient topics, discursive strategies, and underlying conceptualizations of depression may be identified. In studying what is essentially first-hand narratives about living with and managing depression via corpus-analytical methods, the purpose of the chapter is two-fold: firstly, it introduces the reader to a range of basic notions and techniques in corpus-linguistic approaches to discourse, and, secondly, it hopefully sheds light on how people suffering from depression linguistically encode and conceptualize the illness and their management of the illness.

AB - Depression still has taboo status in many societies, and is not something people can talk readily and openly about. This is, needless to say, a problem to many people who suffer from depression, as it means that – other than mental health professionals – they have very few people to talk to about their illness. This is problematic because understanding how people with depression conceptualize the illness could be valuable in many ways, and one way to identify such conceptualizations is through analysis of texts on depression by people with depression. Fortunately, the Internet offers a way for people with depression to talk about the illness in the form of blogging, providing a plethora of data. So many, in fact, that corpus-methodology is preferred over traditional qualitative close-reading. This chapter presents a corpus-linguistic case study of a corpus of blog posts about depression. In applying some corpus-linguistic methods, the study aims to identify common patterns of language use within corpus and illustrates how salient topics, discursive strategies, and underlying conceptualizations of depression may be identified. In studying what is essentially first-hand narratives about living with and managing depression via corpus-analytical methods, the purpose of the chapter is two-fold: firstly, it introduces the reader to a range of basic notions and techniques in corpus-linguistic approaches to discourse, and, secondly, it hopefully sheds light on how people suffering from depression linguistically encode and conceptualize the illness and their management of the illness.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - corpus linguistics

KW - corpus methodology

KW - mental health

KW - depression

KW - conceptualization

KW - cognitive linguistics

KW - metaphor

KW - grammar

KW - discourse

KW - blogs

UR - https://www.routledge.com/Reimagining-Communication-Meaning/Filimowicz-Tzankova/p/book/9781138542884

M3 - Book chapter

VL - 1

BT - Reimagining Communication

A2 - Filimowicz, Michael

A2 - Tzankova, Veronika

PB - Routledge

CY - London

ER -