The language of pain in applied linguistics: review article of Chryssoula Lascaratou's The language of pain (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007)

Studies of the language we use to talk about pain pain language have hitherto been mainly confined to medical disciplines, and there has been little research in the literature in linguistics and applied linguistics. The appearance of a major new study on pain language, Chryssoula Lascaratous The language of pain, presents an opportunity for a review of the book in the context of an overview of this highly complex inter-disciplinary field. The quantitative, word-based MsGill Pain Questionnaire is summarized as a diagnostic instrument from the point of view of language, and compared to Lascaratous corpus-based investigation of the use of pain language in Modern Greek conversations between doctors and patients. The focus of this research is on the lexico-grammatical structuring of pain language, and the representation of pain in terms of cognitive metaphors. Copyright 2009 Roland Sussex. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.