Gavin Brookes

Digital Health Discourse offers a comprehensive overview of how health and illness are talked about, represented, and negotiated across contemporary digital platforms. Bringing together linguistic, discourse-analytical, and multimodal perspectives, it explores a wide range of digital contexts—including health query interfaces, online support groups, websites, social media, mobile health apps, and patient feedback systems—to reveal how digital technologies shape notions of health knowledge, expertise, responsibility, and care in the digital age. The textbook foregrounds the role of platform affordances, participation, and design in structuring interaction, while attending closely to broader social forces such as medicalization, commercialization, neoliberalism, and inequality. By combining theoretical discussion with rich, detailed examples from existing research, it equips readers with the conceptual tools needed to critically analyze digital health communication and understand how everyday online interactions not only reflect but continually shape and reshape contemporary health practices. Through detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how to conduct discourse analyses of interactions that use language and other visual resources, involving both health experts and non-professionals, including those with lived experience. Readers are invited to complete practical tasks designed to inspire their own research into the ever-expanding domains of digital health communication. Essential for researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and health, health communication, and discourse analysis.

Digital Health Discourse offers a comprehensive overview of how health and illness are talked about, represented, and negotiated across contemporary digital platforms. Bringing together linguistic, discourse-analytical, and multimodal perspectives, it explores a wide range of digital contexts—including health query interfaces, online support groups, websites, social media, mobile health apps, and patient feedback systems—to reveal how digital technologies shape notions of health knowledge, expertise, responsibility, and care in the digital age. The textbook foregrounds the role of platform affordances, participation, and design in structuring interaction, while attending closely to broader social forces such as medicalization, commercialization, neoliberalism, and inequality. By combining theoretical discussion with rich, detailed examples from existing research, it equips readers with the conceptual tools needed to critically analyze digital health communication and understand how everyday online interactions not only reflect but continually shape and reshape contemporary health practices. Through detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how to conduct discourse analyses of interactions that use language and other visual resources, involving both health experts and non-professionals, including those with lived experience. Readers are invited to complete practical tasks designed to inspire their own research into the ever-expanding domains of digital health communication. Essential for researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and health, health communication, and discourse analysis.

Communication is central to the experience of illness and the provision of healthcare. This book showcases the insights that can be gained into health communication by means of corpus linguistics – the computer-aided linguistic analysis of large datasets of naturally occurring language use known as 'corpora'. The book takes readers through the stages that they must go through to carry out corpus linguistic research on health communication, from formulating research questions to disseminating findings to interested stakeholders. It helps readers anticipate and deal with different kinds of challenges they may encounter, and shows the variety of applications of the methods discussed, from interactions in Accident and Emergency departments, to online discussions of mental illness, and press representations of obesity. Providing the reader with a wide range of clear case studies, it makes the relevant methods and findings accessible, engaging and inspiring. This title is also available open access on Cambridge Core.

Communication is central to the experience of illness and the provision of healthcare. This book showcases the insights that can be gained into health communication by means of corpus linguistics – the computer-aided linguistic analysis of large datasets of naturally occurring language use known as 'corpora'. The book takes readers through the stages that they must go through to carry out corpus linguistic research on health communication, from formulating research questions to disseminating findings to interested stakeholders. It helps readers anticipate and deal with different kinds of challenges they may encounter, and shows the variety of applications of the methods discussed, from interactions in Accident and Emergency departments, to online discussions of mental illness, and press representations of obesity. Providing the reader with a wide range of clear case studies, it makes the relevant methods and findings accessible, engaging and inspiring. This title is also available open access on Cambridge Core.

Today, the topic of gender identity is being discussed more widely than ever before. With the rise of online misogyny and in the wake of #metoo, language around masculinity and toxic masculinity merits closer examination. Accessibly written by two leading linguists, this book provides a comprehensive treatment of the debates around language and masculinity, asking how language is used to perform masculinity and how language is used to represent men.Including examples of research from a range of international scholars, along with original case studies and engaging examples from popular culture, media, literature, advertising and politics, the authors address a wide range of theoretical and methodological standpoints. The book examines concepts of gender performativity, hegemonic masculinity and queer theory, drawing on disciplines and methods including conversation analysis, phonetics, ethnography, interviews, focus groups, visual analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse studies and corpus linguistics. Situating male language use in terms of power, dominance and subordination, the book concludes with an examination of the more recent concepts of toxic masculinity and healthy masculinity, exploring critical stances towards and around language used by men.This book demonstrates the role that linguistic research can play in addressing real-world problems associated with masculinity – problems experienced by people of all genders and the natural world more broadly. Masculinities and Language is vital reading for scholars, researchers and students of language and gender, sexuality, identity, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics within linguistics, English language and related areas.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Today, the topic of gender identity is being discussed more widely than ever before. With the rise of online misogyny and in the wake of #metoo, language around masculinity and toxic masculinity merits closer examination. Accessibly written by two leading linguists, this book provides a comprehensive treatment of the debates around language and masculinity, asking how language is used to perform masculinity and how language is used to represent men.Including examples of research from a range of international scholars, along with original case studies and engaging examples from popular culture, media, literature, advertising and politics, the authors address a wide range of theoretical and methodological standpoints. The book examines concepts of gender performativity, hegemonic masculinity and queer theory, drawing on disciplines and methods including conversation analysis, phonetics, ethnography, interviews, focus groups, visual analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse studies and corpus linguistics. Situating male language use in terms of power, dominance and subordination, the book concludes with an examination of the more recent concepts of toxic masculinity and healthy masculinity, exploring critical stances towards and around language used by men.This book demonstrates the role that linguistic research can play in addressing real-world problems associated with masculinity – problems experienced by people of all genders and the natural world more broadly. Masculinities and Language is vital reading for scholars, researchers and students of language and gender, sexuality, identity, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics within linguistics, English language and related areas.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

How do language learners interact with those who already speak the language they are learning? It is more than just a question of learning vocabulary and grammars – learners also need to learn how to put together conversations in their new language and to vary the way they interact across different contexts. This book shows, using millions of words of data, how this happens. It is the first large scale, corpus-based exploration of the discourse macro-structures in conversational interaction between L1 and L2 speakers, and explores three corpora to show, in spoken interaction with L1 speakers across a range of tasks, the dynamics of discourse construction. Considering factors including cultural background, task and proficiency, it characterises the repertoire of discourse functions used in these interactions and shows how they vary according to a range of variables. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication provides an accessible and practical introduction to the use of corpus linguistics methods to analyse health-related language use across various contexts and genres. Offering a critical review of the field, discussion of extended case studies, and practical exercises based on spoken, written, and digital language data, this book: introduces the fields of health communication and corpus linguistics and critically reviews cutting-edge studies in the burgeoning area of corpus-based health communication; describes the processes involved in planning a corpus linguistics study of health communication, including designing and building a corpus, selecting tools, and implementing techniques of analysis; demonstrates how corpus linguistics methods can – and have – been applied to the study of spoken, written, and digital health communication, offering critical reflections and suggesting areas for future development.Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication is essential reading for those working at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication. Both those with a little or a lot of experience in either field will find value in its pages.

Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication provides an accessible and practical introduction to the use of corpus linguistics methods to analyse health-related language use across various contexts and genres. Offering a critical review of the field, discussion of extended case studies, and practical exercises based on spoken, written, and digital language data, this book: introduces the fields of health communication and corpus linguistics and critically reviews cutting-edge studies in the burgeoning area of corpus-based health communication; describes the processes involved in planning a corpus linguistics study of health communication, including designing and building a corpus, selecting tools, and implementing techniques of analysis; demonstrates how corpus linguistics methods can – and have – been applied to the study of spoken, written, and digital health communication, offering critical reflections and suggesting areas for future development.Corpus Linguistics for Health Communication is essential reading for those working at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication. Both those with a little or a lot of experience in either field will find value in its pages.

This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus of 14-million words of patient comments about NHS cancer services in England. The first approach utilises demographic tags to group comments according to patients' sex/age while the second involves categorising cases where patients disclose their sex/age in their comments. This Element compares the findings from either approach, with the approaches themselves being critically discussed in terms of their implications for corpus-aided studies of language and identity.

The Language of Patient Feedback provides a unique insight into a diverse range of issues related to healthcare. Through the comprehensive and detailed interrogation of 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in England, as well as 11 million words of responses to the feedback from NHS providers, this book:Uses a combination of computer-assisted and human analysis (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis) to examine the extent to which characteristics like age and gender result in different types of evaluation.Investigates why nurses, doctors, dentists and receptionists are associated with very distinct types of feedback.Demonstrates the ways that NHS staff respond to comments and what this reveals about underlying institutional ideologies and practices. Concludes with suggestions for key recommendations that the NHS could act upon to improve the overall level of care it provides, as well as reflecting on what patient evaluation can actually tell us.The Language of Patient Feedback is key reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication.

**Shortlisted for the 2021 BAAL Book Prize for an outstanding book in the field of Applied Linguistics**Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia. In examining contemporary health communication data, the book combines quantitative corpus linguistic methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical health sociology. Using this mixed-methods approach, the analysis identifies patterns and consistencies in the language used by people experiencing psychological distress and their role in realising varying representations of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment. Far from being neutral accounts of suffering and treating illness, corpus analysis illustrates that these interactions are suffused with moral and ideological tensions sufferers seek to collectively negotiate responsibility for the onset and treatment of recalcitrant mental health problems. Integrating corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and health sociology, this book showcases the capacity of linguistic analysis for understanding mental health discourse as well as critically exploring the potential of corpus linguistics to offer an evidence-based approach to health communication research.

Obesity is a pressing social issue and a persistently newsworthy topic for the media. This book examines the linguistic representation of obesity in the British press. It combines techniques from corpus linguistics with critical discourse studies to analyse a large corpus of newspaper articles (36 million words) representing ten years of obesity coverage. These articles are studied from a range of methodological perspectives, and analytical themes include variation between newspapers, change over time, diet and exercise, gender and social class. The volume also investigates the language that readers use when responding to obesity representations in the context of online comments. The authors reveal the power of linguistic choices to shame and stigmatise people with obesity, presenting them as irresponsible and morally deviant. Yet the analysis also demonstrates the potential for alternative representations which place greater focus on the role that social and political forces play in this topical health issue.

Obesity is a pressing social issue and a persistently newsworthy topic for the media. This book examines the linguistic representation of obesity in the British press. It combines techniques from corpus linguistics with critical discourse studies to analyse a large corpus of newspaper articles (36 million words) representing ten years of obesity coverage. These articles are studied from a range of methodological perspectives, and analytical themes include variation between newspapers, change over time, diet and exercise, gender and social class. The volume also investigates the language that readers use when responding to obesity representations in the context of online comments. The authors reveal the power of linguistic choices to shame and stigmatise people with obesity, presenting them as irresponsible and morally deviant. Yet the analysis also demonstrates the potential for alternative representations which place greater focus on the role that social and political forces play in this topical health issue.

**Shortlisted for the 2021 BAAL Book Prize for an outstanding book in the field of Applied Linguistics**Situated at the interface of corpus linguistics and health communication, Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health provides insights into the linguistic practices of members of three online support communities as they describe their experiences of living with and managing different mental health problems, including anorexia nervosa, depression and diabulimia. In examining contemporary health communication data, the book combines quantitative corpus linguistic methods with qualitative discourse analysis that draws upon recent theoretical insights from critical health sociology. Using this mixed-methods approach, the analysis identifies patterns and consistencies in the language used by people experiencing psychological distress and their role in realising varying representations of mental illness, diagnosis and treatment. Far from being neutral accounts of suffering and treating illness, corpus analysis illustrates that these interactions are suffused with moral and ideological tensions sufferers seek to collectively negotiate responsibility for the onset and treatment of recalcitrant mental health problems. Integrating corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis and health sociology, this book showcases the capacity of linguistic analysis for understanding mental health discourse as well as critically exploring the potential of corpus linguistics to offer an evidence-based approach to health communication research.

The Language of Patient Feedback provides a unique insight into a diverse range of issues related to healthcare. Through the comprehensive and detailed interrogation of 29 million words of online patient feedback on the NHS in England, as well as 11 million words of responses to the feedback from NHS providers, this book: Uses a combination of computer-assisted and human analysis (Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis) to examine the extent to which characteristics like age and gender result in different types of evaluation. Investigates why nurses, doctors, dentists and receptionists are associated with very distinct types of feedback. Demonstrates the ways that NHS staff respond to comments and what this reveals about underlying institutional ideologies and practices. Concludes with suggestions for key recommendations that the NHS could act upon to improve the overall level of care it provides, as well as reflecting on what patient evaluation can actually tell us.The Language of Patient Feedback is key reading for anyone undertaking research within corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication.