Abstrakt: | This paper aims at identifying the place of pain in language by analysing, in most
part, adjectival pain descriptors (in terms of their morphology and lexico-semantics),
especially the ones present in the English (original) version of the McGill
Pain Questionnaire (Melzack & Torgerson 1971, Melzack 1975), mainly through
the cognitive linguistic prisms. This self-report questionnaire (given by doctors to
their patients so that the latter can describe their pain in terms of various qualities
and intensity) has for years been successfully employed in clinical settings, but its
diagnostic potency may be to some extent compromized by the interplay of both
linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Thus, in order to check how potent these
MPQ descriptors are (and whether they are still potent), the present analysis is
enriched with the discussion of these adjectival pain collocations not only in the
context of the MPQ, but also in other ‘localizations’, be it an alternative pain questionnaire,
and fragments of academic articles and books addressing certain types/
qualities of pain. Adopting such an approach provides the chance to glimpse the
pain descriptors in question in the broader context, that is, how pain is ‘located’
in the academic discourse of pain experts and clinicians, but also, and perhaps
even more importantly, how ‘lay’ pain sufferers ‘position’ their pain(s). The analysis
carried out and the conclusions drawn reveal an interesting ‘place’—a point of
convergence, an intersection of pain (as a multi-layered construct) and metaphorinfused
language. My conviction, then, is that pain is placed in and predominantly
expressed via metaphoric language at various (less and more subtle) levels, and also
that pain metaphor is not only a research object, but may additionally prove an
efficient (diagnostic) research tool. |