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analysis of the emergence of metaphors in breast cancer narratives based on Corpus Linguistics strategies

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the emergence of conceptual metaphors reveals subjective experiences in the narratives of patients who developed and treat breast cancer and their coping strategies. Therefore, an adaptation of a method, based on Corpus Linguistics, is proposed to identify these metaphors found in these women’s discourse based on the identification and in the extraction of candidate terms for possible conceptual domains. Texts were collected from 31 freely accessible blogs on the subject under study, constituting a corpus of 2036 texts. One of the blogs, consisting of 23 posts, was chosen as a reference to assess whether the chosen tool and the adapted methodology combined with the study. Based on this, a list of keywords was created to extract candidate terms for conceptual domains, constituting a reference list for the analysis of the other texts. Among the most frequent conceptual domains, the following emerged: entity, strength of nature, game, container, travel, monetary value and war. Also, to a lesser extent, elements linked to religion and spirituality eventually emerged. From the analysis undertaken, it is highlighted that the realization of metaphors in the narratives act as coping strategies, given that they are evidence of the conceptual elaboration of these experiences.