Gender and the Language of Illness

by Charteris-Black, Jonathan; Seale, Clive

• ISBN13: 9780230222359
• ISBN10: 0230222358
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book presents an investigation of the influence of gender, social class, age and illness type in the language of people talking about their experiences of illness. It shows evidence of both conformity with and resistance to gender stereotypes.

Author Biography

JONATHAN CHARTERIS-BLACK is Professor of Linguistics in the University of the West of England, UK, and formerly Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey. He is author of: Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis (2004), Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (2005) and Communication and Leadership: The Design of Leadership Style (2006).
 
CLIVE SEALE is Professor of Medical Sociology at Queen Mary University of London, UK, where he works in the medical school. Previously he has been Professor of Sociology at Brunel University and at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of The Quality of Qualitative Research (1999), Constructing Death: the Sociology of Dying and Bereaevment (1998) and Media and Health (2002) as well as numerous other books, chapters and articles.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xiv
Gender and the Language of Illness	p. 1
Introduction - sex, gender and identity	p. 1
Difference: Sex, sex roles and comparison	p. 4
Introduction	p. 4
Sex	p. 5
Sex roles	p. 6
Comparison of sex and sex roles	p. 8
Gender as performance	p. 11
Introduction	p. 11
Communities of practice	p. 12
Discourse	p. 14
Illness, language and social variables	p. 17
Illness and language	p. 17
Illness and gender	p. 19
Language and age	p. 21
Language and social class	p. 22
Summary	p. 24
Methods for Investigating Gender and Language	p. 25
Introduction	p. 25
Variationist sociolinguistics	p. 25
Corpus-based research	p. 28
Concepts related to corpus research	p. 32
Keywords	p. 32
Key concepts	p. 34
Keywords and key concepts compared	p. 36
Deriving discourses from keywords and key concepts	p. 41
Corpus and sub-corpora	p. 45
The full matched sample	p. 47
The social class (SEC) matched sample	p. 48
The age matched sample	p. 49
The specific illness sample	p. 49
Summary	p. 51
Men's Traditional Discourse of Illness: Distancing and Avoidance	p. 52
Introduction: Men and discourses of illness	p. 52
Linguistic strategy: Reification	p. 56
Linguistic strategy: Deictic distancing	p. 62
Linguistic strategy: Distancing through abstractions	p. 69
Introduction	p. 69
'Solution/s'	p. 73
'System/s'	p. 73
'Pattern/s' and 'technique/s'	p. 76
Discursive style: Avoidance through sports talk	p. 76
Discursive style: Swearing	p. 82
Summary	p. 85
A Feminine Discourse of Illness: Transformation and Modality	p. 87
Introduction	p. 87
Feminine discourse of illness	p. 90
Overview	p. 90
Verb analysis	p. 91
Feminine discursive style: Low modality	p. 95
Analysis of mental process verb (cognitive): 'Think/Thought'	p. 95
Analysis of mental process verb (cognitive): 'Mean'	p. 98
Elaboration	p. 99
Explanation	p. 100
Contrastive function	p. 101
Analysis of mental process verb (cognitive): 'Imagine'	p. 104
Analysis of mental process verb (cognitive): 'Know'	p. 106
Feminine discursive style: High modality	p. 109
Analysis of mental process verb (cognitive): 'Knew'	p. 109
Analysis of mental process verb (affective): 'Need'	p. 111
Analysis of mental process verb (affective): 'Want'	p. 116
Summary	p. 117
Emotional Disclosure: Socio-economic Classification, Age and Gender	p. 119
Introduction: Gender and emotion	p. 119
Socio-economic classification (SEC)	p. 124
Overview - Emotional disclosure	p. 124
Low SEC women	p. 129
High SEC men	p. 134
High SEC women	p. 141
Low SEC men	p. 145
Age and emotion	p. 147
Overview	p. 147
Younger men	p. 151
Younger women	p. 155
Older men	p. 157
Older women	p. 159
Summary	p. 161
Experience of Support: Gender, Class and Age	p. 162
Research on support	p. 162
The experience of support	p. 166
Overview	p. 166
Gender specific use of support-related lexis	p. 169
Socio-economic classification (SEC)	p. 171
Age	p. 172
Sources of support	p. 175
Men's sources of support: 'People: Male' and 'Belonging to a group'	p. 175
Women's sources of support: 'Kin' and 'family'	p. 180
Analysis of family	p. 180
Analysis of non-family	p. 184
Modes of communication	p. 185
Use of 'talk'	p. 187
Use of 'phone'	p. 189
Use of reported speech	p. 190
Use of 'write'	p. 192
Summary	p. 195
Illness Type and Gender	p. 196
Introduction	p. 196
The language of illness experience	p. 196
Heart disease	p. 201
Key concepts: Measurement and time	p. 201
Lifestyle change and self-transformation	p. 208
Interaction between heart disease and gender	p. 215
Overview	p. 215
Key concept analysis of gender and heart disease	p. 216
Summary	p. 225
Conclusion	p. 226
Men's Key Concepts (Full Matched Sample)	p. 230
Women's Key Concepts (Full Matched Sample)	p. 232
Significance Levels for Log-Likelihood Test	p. 234
Demographic Sample of the British National Corpus	p. 235
References	p. 237
Index	p. 24
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