讲座题目：Metaphor, (im)politeness and schizophrenia

讲座人：Elena Semino (Lancaster University)

讲座时间：2018年10月31日上午10:30-12:00

讲座地点：外国语学院多功能厅

讲座摘要：

This talk reports on a study investigating how ten voice-hearers with diagnoses of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders describe their interactions with hallucinatory voices. I focus particularly on how relative power and control manifest themselves through (im)politeness phenomena and metaphor use in the reports of interactions between Voice and Hearer.

Voice-hearing is reported by approximately 70% of individuals with diagnoses on the schizophrenia-spectrum, but a sizable minority copewell with such experiences. A key factor seems to be hearers’ perceptions of the power of the voices to influence their actions and mental states and the extent to which they in turn feel in control of their own thinking and voices’ behaviour. However, this ‘sense of control’ is normally measured by psychometric assessments which rely on voice-hearers’ awareness of and willingness to disclose the nature of their relationships with voices, and which do not distinguish between potentially different types of control.

I demonstrate the potential contribution of an analysis of face management and (im)politeness, and of metaphor use, in voice-hearers’ reports of interactions with voices in the ten interviews. I report some preliminary evidence of correlations between hearers’ degree of distress on the one hand and, on the other hand, (a) impoliteness on the voices’ part and (b) voice-hearers’ use of ‘disempowering’ metaphors. I finish by reflecting on the implications of these findings for a better understanding of the lived experience of voice-hearers and for new ways of assessing voice-hearers’ relationships with voices.

专家简介

Elena Semino is Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. She holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Fuzhou. She specializes in: corpus linguistics, medical humanities, health communication, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis. She has (co-)authored over 80 academic publications, including: Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Figurative Language, Genre and Register (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A Corpus-based Study (Routledge, 2018). In the periods 2011-14 and 2015-18, she was Head of Lancaster’s Department of Linguistics and English Language.