Language, Discourse and Anxiety

Description:
Why is language so important to the ways that we make sense of anxiety? This book uses corpus assisted discourse analysis to examine twenty-three million words of text posted to a forum for people with anxiety. It shows how linguistic techniques like catastrophisation and anthropomorphisation can result in very different conceptualisations of anxiety, as well as how aspects of identity like age, sex and cultural background can impact on understandings of anxiety and how it ought to be managed. It tracks the changing identities of posters, from their first posts to their last, and incorporates a range of corpus-based techniques to examine the language data, enabling consideration of interaction between participants and features associated with online forms of communication like emoji. It ultimately provides a step towards a better understanding of different responses to anxiety and aims to promote further engagement with this topic in the field of applied linguistics.

Contents
List of Figures page ix
List of Tables x
Acknowledgements xii
Preface xiii
1 Anxiety, Online Fora and This Study 1
Introduction 1
Anxiety Disorders 2
Investigating the Language of Anxiety Disorders 6
Online Forums 17
HealthUnlocked: the Anxiety Support Forum 19
Overview of the Book 26
2 Sketching Anxiety 29
Introduction 29
Meaning by Association 30
The Meaning of Anxiety 32
Word Sketch 36
Conclusion 61
3 The Lived Experience 62
Introduction 62
Online Forums as Computer-Mediated Communication 62
Keyness 67
What Do Members of the Anxiety Support Forum
Set Out to Discuss? 69
Emoticons and Emoji 91
Conclusion 94
4 Creating a Community 96
Introduction 96
Forum Interactions 97
Replies in the Anxiety Support Forum 98
Documenting Forum Interactions 103
vii

Discourse Unit Patterns 111
Combinations of Discourse Units within Posts 121
Sequences of Functional Discourse Units 124
Discussion 132
Conclusion 133
5 Sex and Gender 135
Introduction 135
Sex, Gender and Anxiety Disorders 135
Male and Female Keywords 139
Discussion 155
Discourses of Gender 156
Conclusion 164
6 Comparing Cultures 166
Introduction 166
Cultural Keywords 168
Conclusion 189
7 Time 191
Introduction 191
Comparing Years 192
Changing Themes over Time 197
Comparing Age 201
The Journey from First to Last Post 219
Conclusion 227
8 Conclusion 228
Introduction 228
Working with a Corpus of Forum Posts 228
Conceptualising Anxiety 232
Strategies 234
The Value of the Forum 235
Future Directions 239
Concluding Remarks 241
References 242
Index 259