The place(s) of pain and its linguistic descriptions - the morphology and lexico-semantics of English pain descriptors : a cognitive linguistic perspective

Abstract

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.