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In this thought-provoking webinar Professor Elena Semino introduced ‘Applying Corpus Linguistics to Illness and Healthcare’ (Cambridge University Press, 2025) a book she co-authored. In particular, she described the role of metaphors in healthcare communication and the frequency of collocations used around the word “pain” (chapter 2), “cancer” (chapter 9), and “vaccine” (chapter 11).
The McGill Pain Questionnaire is a self-reporting tool for patients which includes a list of descriptors used to assess the quality of their pain. Researchers have long discussed concerns about the validity of the questionnaire, in particular how well patients understand the descriptors. Elena and her team studied the comprehensibility of these descriptors in relation to the frequency of descriptor occurrence in corpora and collocations associated with pain intensity.
They found that “the choice of descriptor is explicable largely or entirely in terms of strength of the collocation link from the word “pain” to that descriptor”.
Recent NHS policy on cancer-related metaphors has shifted the perspective from “fighting/losing the battle” to the “cancer journey”. The researchers explored the link between the violence metaphors and patient feelings of empowerment. Elena and her team developed a “Metaphor Menu” – a downloadable PDF leaflet offering a collection of metaphors to describe one´s cancer experience. It is already available in Spanish and Italian, with more languages on the way.
Elena also recommended a classic essential read on military metaphors: “Illness as Metaphor” by Susan Sontag (1979).
The MMR vaccine Twitter corpus is a compilation of tweets in which both “MMR vaccine” and “covid”/”covid vaccine” are mentioned together in contrast – framing the MMR vaccine as effective and the covid vaccine as non-effective.
The analysis revealed differences in how the two vaccines are discussed. The MMR vaccine is presented as a “real vaccine” – one that “stops transmission”, while the covid vaccine is more commonly associated with words like “shot” or “jab”, placing it in the same category as the flu vaccine, thus having an unknown effect.
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