Language use and conceptualizations in blogs on life with depression

Lecture by Kim Ebensgaard Jensen.

Abstract

This talk presents a corpus-linguistic study of patterns of language use in a British corpus of blog posts about life with depression. In studying, applying corpus-analytical methods, first-hand narratives about living with and managing depression, this talk aims to 1) shed light on how people who suffer from depression linguistically encode and conceptualize the illness and their management of the illness and 2) identify patterns of language use within the genre of blogging about mental health topics. Thus, this study is a contribution to not only corpus linguistics and mental health studies, but also Internet linguistics, cognitive linguistics and register/genre studies.