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Review article published In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 32:1 (2009) ► pp.6.1–6.14

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Review article

Review article of Chryssoula Lascaratou’s the language of pain

Reviewer
 | The University of Queensland
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 January 2009
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https://doi.org/10.2104/aral0906
Studies of the language we use to talk about pain – “pain language” – have hitherto been mainly confined to medical disciplines, and there has been little research in the literature in linguistics and applied linguistics. The appearance of a major new study on pain language, Chryssoula Lascaratou’s The language of pain, presents an opportunity for a review of the book in the context of an overview of this highly complex inter-disciplinary field. The quantitative, word-based MsGill Pain Questionnaire is summarized as a diagnostic instrument from the point of view of language, and compared to Lascaratou’s corpus-based investigation of the use of pain language in Modern Greek conversations between doctors and patients. The focus of this research is on the lexicogrammatical structuring of pain language, and the representation of pain in terms of cognitive metaphors.
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