Article published In: Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 10:1 (2020) ► pp.45–75
Metaphors in communication about pregnancy loss
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 1 May 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.18030.lit
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.18030.lit
Abstract
Pregnancy loss, encompassing miscarriage, stillbirth and termination for foetal abnormality, can be considered a
particularly intense and unique form of bereavement, which engenders difficult or painful emotions. When people are talking about
such emotions, they have been found to make extensive use of metaphor (Semino, E. (2011). Metaphor, creativity, and the experience of pain across genres. In J. Swann, R. Carter and R. Pope (Eds.), Creativity, Language, Literature: The State of the Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 83–102. ).
In this paper, we use metaphor analysis of a small corpus of interviews with individuals in England who have suffered such losses,
and people who support them, to explore the nature of the bereavement. In particular, we focus on the ways in which metaphor is
used to describe the experience of the loss, the effects that this loss has on people’s conceptions of themselves and their
bodies, and the implications this has for recovery. We identify a number of characteristics that can lead the bereaved to
conceptualise their realities in different ways, which have implications for the grieving process, the ways in which people
respond to their grief, and ultimately their recovery.
Keywords: metaphor, pregnancy loss, bereavement, emotion, the body
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methodology
- 3.Findings
- 3.1Embodied experience
- 3.2Relationships with the body
- 3.3Experiencing a different reality
- 3.4Recovery
- 4.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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