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Article published In: International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 10:1 (2023) ► pp.1–32

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Conceptualizing health

A corpus-based Cultural Linguistic study

 | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Published online: 12 December 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.19018.sco
Abstract
The word ‘health’ is highly polysemous, and many attempts have been made to define its meaning in terms of actual use and to create a workable and even universal concept of health (Balog, J. E. (1978). An historical review and philosophical analysis of alternative concepts of health and their relationship to health education (Unpublished dissertation). Maryland: University of Maryland.; Boruchovitch, E., & Mednick, B. R. (2002). The meaning of health and illness: Some considerations for health psychology. Psico-USF, 7(2), 175–183. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, though the meaning of ‘health’ has been debated extensively, as well as the metaphorical conceptualizations of illness (e.g., Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. (Reprinted 1991 as Illness as metaphor & AIDS and its metaphors, London: Penguin Classics.)Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), there has been little treatment of how health is metaphorically conceptualized. This article investigates the meaning of the word ‘health’ in the United States and the United Kingdom, through a search on websites based on an examination of concordances in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). It focuses on the senses emerging from metaphorical cultural conceptualizations. Recent developments in Conceptual Metaphor Theory ( (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Yu, N. (2009). From body to meaning in culture: Papers on cognitive semantic studies of Chinese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and Cultural Linguistics (Palmer, G. (1996). Toward a theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptions and language: Theoretical framework and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) have increased the focus on the interaction between cognition and culture. I present an analysis of the conceptual metaphors, proposition schemas, and image schemas that converge to form a cultural model for health within these speech communities revealing, for example, that one model sees health in terms of a manageable valuable commodity, which may contribute to health behaviors such as self-tracking and observation, as discussed by Lupton, D. (2016). The quantified self. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Current definitions
    • 2.1Origins of the term
    • 2.2The OED lexical definition
    • 2.3Medical sociological definitions
    • 2.4Cultural linguistics and lexical semantics
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Overview of the data
  • 5.Health and metaphor: An analysis
    • 5.1Health as a fragile object
    • 5.2Health as a manageable valuable commodity
  • 6.Cultural models of health
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (38)
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