Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art at Lancaster University

Lecture: Thursday 15^th of March, 10:15-12:00, Eng16-0043
Metaphor, creativity and reconceptualization in communication about illness

Workshop: Thursday 15^th of March, 14:15-16:00, Eng16-0016
Language, mind and autism in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'

Pre-registration to the seminar is compulsory! Register via our calendar

Lecture abstract

The aim of this talk is to show how metaphor can be used creatively to express and encourage new thinking in a wide range of domains of activity, and particularly in communication about illness. I begin by briefly introducing the theory of metaphor known as ‘Conceptual Metaphor theory’, developed by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and others. I then place the notions of ‘conventional’ and ‘creative’ metaphors within this theory, and focus particularly on how creative metaphors have the potential to foster new ways of thinking about familiar topics. I then consider the role of metaphor in communication about health and illness, and reflect on how some conventional metaphors about disease can potentially have negative effects for sufferers and for communication between health professionals and patients. I then demonstrate the reconceptualizing potential of creative metaphors in talking about cancer and in expressing the experience of chronic pain. My examples are mainly drawn from projects in which patients were given the opportunity to develop their own ways of talking and thinking about their condition.

Workshop description

The workshop will be devoted to the linguistic analysis of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). The goal of the analysis is to account for one of the most central aspects of readers’ interpretation of the novel – the perception that the protagonist and first-person narrator, Christopher Boone, has an autistic-spectrum disorder, usually identified as Asperger’s syndrome. Participants will be provided with a selection of extracts from the novel which will enable them to investigate distinctive choices and patterns in vocabulary, grammar, figurative language, deixis, speech presentation, and interactional behaviour. These patterns arguably contribute to or, minimally, are consistent with the inference that Christopher has an autistic-spectrum disorder. Participants will also be introduced to ways of supplementing ‘manual’ linguistic analysis with quantitative evidence gained by applying corpus-linguistic methods to the novel.