Researching Language and Health: A Student Guide

Researching Language and Health explores key topics in illness and healthcare contexts through multiple linguistic lenses.

This book highlights key themes, guides readers through the design stages of research and the ethical considerations specific to linguistic health research, and brings methods and methodologies to life by demonstrating how these can be applied to specific issues in context. Covering a wide range of health conditions, healthcare contexts, and data types, with an emphasis on those most accessible to students and new researchers, the authors foreground the ’so what?’ of research and the impact that linguistic studies can have.

Both a guide to key elements of the research process and a holistic view of research projects that have been successful, insightful, and impactful in different contexts, this is an essential text for advanced students and researchers in healthcare communication and applied linguistics.

Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at University College London. Her main research interests are language and discourses around illness, with recent projects focussing on depression, psychosis, cancer, and vaccinations. She uses a range of analytical tools including discourse, metaphor, narrative, and corpus analysis.

Sarah Atkins is a Teaching and Research Fellow at Aston University with research interests in language and communication in professional contexts. She has worked on a number of projects within healthcare and health education, with a focus on the practical relevance of findings for practitioners.

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 specializes in health communication, medical humanities, corpus linguistics, stylistics, narratology and metaphor theory and analysis.