The Narrative Genre in Health Discourse
An Analysis of Patients’ Accounts of Diabetes and Cancer
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.34.2.198-222Keywords:
Systemic Functional Linguistics, genre, health discourse, patient narrative, empowermentAbstract
This study investigates the linguistic functioning of the narrative genre within health discourse by analyzing accounts produced by individuals living with type 1 diabetes mellitus and by those who have experienced breast cancer. The research seeks to understand how this genre is organized across distinct experiential domains, with particular attention to its stages, phases, and lexicogrammatical choices. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which offers a robust theoretical framework for investigating health-related discourse, this study explores how different experiential domains shape the production of the same genre, specifically, the narrative genre produced by patients. To this end, ten self-narratives collected from online sources were examined according to the lexicogrammatical systems described in SFL (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and the definitions of genre, stages, and phases proposed by Martin and Rose (2008) and Rose (2019). The findings indicate that, while the stages of the genre tend to remain stable, the phases vary according to the experiential domain. Although the narratives share similar grammatical patterns, they draw on distinct lexical choices to construct specific experiences. The study concluded that patient narratives represent fundamental linguistic resources for understanding how meanings about illness and identity are constructed within health discourse.
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