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Volume 10, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2214-3157
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Abstract

Abstract

The word ‘health’ is highly polysemous, and many attempts have been made to define its meaning in terms of actual use and to create a workable and even universal concept of (Balog 1978Boruchovitch & Mednick 2002). However, though the meaning of ‘health’ has been debated extensively, as well as the metaphorical conceptualizations of illness (e.g., Sontag 1978), there has been little treatment of how is metaphorically conceptualized. This article investigates the meaning of the word ‘health’ in the United States and the United Kingdom, through a search on websites based on an examination of concordances in the (GloWbE). It focuses on the senses emerging from metaphorical cultural conceptualizations. Recent developments in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Kövecses 2005Yu 2009) and Cultural Linguistics (Palmer 1996Sharifian 2011) have increased the focus on the interaction between cognition and culture. I present an analysis of the conceptual metaphors, proposition schemas, and image schemas that converge to form a cultural model for within these speech communities revealing, for example, that one model sees health in terms of , which may contribute to health behaviors such as self-tracking and observation, as discussed by Lupton (2016).

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2023-12-12
2024-12-05

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/content/journals/10.1075/ijolc.19018.sco
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Conceptualizing health
International Journal of Language and Culture 10, 1 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.19018.sco
/content/journals/10.1075/ijolc.19018.sco
/content/journals/10.1075/ijolc.19018.sco
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): concordance; cultural metaphor; cultural schema; health; semasiology

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