AESLA 2024: Isabel Balteiro Fernández

VOICING “SILENT DISEASES”: LEXICO-SEMANTIC CHOICES IN PATIENTS’ SELF-REPRESENTATIONS - ISABEL BALTEIRO FERNÁNDEZ

Writing about troubling personal experiences is “powerful and compelling”, but “writing about emotional upheavals can have salutary health effects” (Ramírez-Esparza & Pennebaker 2006: 211). Moreover, the use of certain linguistic features is linked to health changes: positive emotions, the increasing use of causal and other cognitive words, etc. are correlated with fewer physician visits (Pennebaker, Mayne & Francis, 1997). Given this increasing evidence of positive health impacts, it is worth analysing the specific lexical and semantic choices made by female patients’ describing their health conditions in the so-called “silent diseases”. Our main objective is the language that women use to express how they feel and perceive their bodies and the associated symptoms. As is inevitable for a condition involving pain, a real but invisible phenomenon, patients’ perceptions of and on osteoporosis tend to be shaped through figurative language. However, other linguistic features (use of adjectives, euphemisms and taboo words) are also explored. Attention is also paid to how lexical and semantic choices may contribute to reinforce stereotypes, stigma, or misinformation and projections to society. Data have been drawn from oral narratives of individual patients’ experiences in osteoporosis specialized webpages. The results show that specific uses and lexico-semantic features achieve positive and respectful representations of patients confronting health. As a general conclusion, patients tend to project a positive view of themselves, despite their suffering, and they often use negative adjectives or metaphors to describe their bones or bodies, but not themselves as a whole.