A corpus stylistic approach to mental health

Price, HL

Abstract

Mental illness is an increasingly important social issue with issues pertaining to the
responsible reporting of mental illness becoming an area that mental health charities
and advocates have focussed on in recent years. In line with the increased social
importance of mental health and illness in social life, the language of mental health and
illness has received increasing attention in recent years within the fields of linguistics
and stylistics specifically (Atanasova et al., 2019; Demjen, 2015; Demjen et al, 2019;
Harvey, 2012; Knapton; 2013). To date, however, there has been very little exploration
of the stylistic patterns at play in this discourse type to see how (i) mental health and
illness are discussed in contemporary language data, and (ii) how linguistic choice can
influence people’s perceptions of social issues.
In this chapter, I use examples from the Mental Illness 1984-2014 corpus, a 45 millionword corpus of UK regional and national newspaper articles reporting on the topic of
mental health and illness, and examples from other reference corpora to explore the
stylistic features of the language of mental illness, with particular reference to
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. Through combining a range of qualitative corpus
stylistic analyses (concordance analysis, semantic prosody analysis, naming analysis)
and quantitative corpus stylistic analyses (keyness analysis, collocation analysis,
frequency analysis), I show how the researcher can make use of “the cline of corpus
stylistics” (McIntyre & Walker, 2019: 315) comprising both qualitative and quantitative
analyses to explore the representation of mental illnesses at varying levels of
magnification. By so doing, I demonstrate the utility of language analysis for better
understanding the discourse of mental health and illness as an understudied discourse
type as well as providing further evidence for the methodological benefits of adopting
corpus stylistic analyses

Citation

Price, H. (2023). A corpus stylistic approach to mental health. In M. Burke (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge

• Online Publication Date: May 29, 2023
• Publication Date: Mar 31, 2023
• Deposit Date: Nov 15, 2022
• Publisher: Routledge
• Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics
• ISBN: 9780367567491
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Stylistics/Burke/p/book/9780367567491