Conceptualizaciones metafóricas y recursos de formulación en narraciones de pacientes con migraña

CIAPUSCIO GUIOMAR ELENA

Oralia

Editorial Arco/Libros-La Muralla, ILSE y CySOC.

Lugar: Madrid; Año: 2016 vol. 19 p. 39 - 60

This paper discusses a set of narratives on critical episodes by people affected by migraine. The voice of patients has acquired higher relevance in recent years, after being long postponed in the field of medicine. Linguistic research on patients? discourse can contribute to the knowledge on and understanding of this disorder, and even to its diagnosis, as shown among others by the researches on cardiac and convulsive illnesses carried out by German and British teams (Gülich y Schöndienstt 1999; Schwabe et al. 2008; Schwabe et al. 2007). In this article I present, from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory and of discursive production theory, an analysis of a corpus of patient narratives in which people explain their migraine attacks: I am interested in expanding the knowledge on how these patients conceptualize and transmit their illness and its main symptom, i.e. headache. The analysis of patients? contributions focuses both on the qualitative aspects of pain and on the description of its intensity, which is particularly rich as regards expressive procedures and resources and leads, occasionally, to the thematization of feelings of fear and panic.