Communication is central to the experience of illness and the provision of healthcare. This book showcases the insights that can be gained into health communication by means of corpus linguistics – the computer-aided linguistic analysis of large datasets of naturally occurring language use known as 'corpora'. The book takes readers through the stages that they must go through to carry out corpus linguistic research on health communication, from formulating research questions to disseminati...

How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammars – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words of data, how this happens. It is the first large scale, corpus-based exploration of the discourse macro-structures in conversational interactio...

Bridging the gap between linguistic theory and practice, this timely book demonstrates the transformative potential of corpus linguistics research and methods across a wide range of contexts. With contributions from a diverse range of authors, this book provides contemporary reflections on both established applications in language education, as well as emergent contexts in which corpus methods are driving social change, such as the media and law. Each chapter provides case studies that cle...

This collection showcases original research highlighting innovations in the application of corpus linguistic methods to the study of English historical medical discourse.The volume builds on recent work expanding the contours of health communication research to extend to medical texts of the past, whose preservation allows for a clearer understanding of changes to medical knowledge and practices over time through their production, reception, and use. Chapters explore how corpus lin...

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication provides an accessible and practical introduction to the use of corpus linguistics methods to analyse health-related language use across various contexts and genres. Offering a critical review of the field, discussion of extended case studies, and practical exercises based on spoken, written, and digital language data, this book:introduces the fields of health communication and corpus linguistics and critically re...

This book brings together a collection of case studies that explore the relationship between health and masculinity. It covers various topics related to health, such as mental health, sexual health, eating disorders and coronavirus, and offers health-based perspectives on issues such as migration and gender identity, as these relate to masculinities. In exploring these themes, this book addresses a wide range of communicative contexts, including online forums, interviews, advertising, sex ...

This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus o...

Obesity is a pressing social issue and a persistently newsworthy topic for the media. This book examines the linguistic representation of obesity in the British press. It combines techniques from corpus linguistics with critical discourse studies to analyse a large corpus of newspaper articles (36 million words) representing ten years of obesity coverage. These articles are studied from a range of methodological perspectives, and analytical themes include variation between newspapers, chan...

This edited book showcases original research in the study of healthcare and health communication, while also providing a detailed overview of contemporary methods of discourse analysis. Discourse approaches remain under-represented in the field of health communication, despite their potential for affording detailed understanding of health-related text and talk across an array of contexts, for example in face-to-face and digital healthcare encounters, health promotion, and patients’ account...

**Shortlisted for the 2021 BAAL Book Prize for an outstanding book in the field of Applied Linguistics**Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia....

The Language of Patient Feedback provides a unique insight into a diverse range of issues related to healthcare. Through the comprehensive and detailed interrogation of 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in England, as well as 11 million words of responses to the feedback from NHS providers, this book:Uses a combination of computer-assisted and human analysis (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis) to examine the extent to which characteris...

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication consists of forty chapters that provide a broad, comprehensive, and systematic overview of the role that linguistics plays within health communication research and its applications.The Handbook is divided into three sections:Individuals’ everyday health communicationHealth professionals’ communicative practicesPatient-provider communication i...