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Stylistics: Mind Style in an Autobiographical Account of Schizophrenia

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Analysing Health Communication

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the experience of what can be labelled 'schizophrenia' and 'auditory verbal hallucinations' in the published autobiographical narrative Henry’s Demons (Cockburn and Cockburn 2011a) through the stylistic concept of ‘mind style’. Mind style is the linguistic reflection of a cognitive state through distinctive textual patterns (Fowler 1977; Leech & Short 2007). We focus in particular on patterns of pronoun use, narrative style, visual focus and the presence/absence of the representation of one's own and others' minds. We link these stylistic patterns to theory of mind and speech and thought organisation, both of which play an important role in medical understandings of schizophrenia. In this way, we show how a stylistics approach can add nuance and pose challenges to existing descriptions of and diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We will use page numbers only for all text references to Henry’s Demons (Cockburn and Cockburn 2011a).

  2. 2.

    We used the Log-likelihood statistic to establish statistical significance at the level of p > 0.0001 (LL = 10). We also used Log Ratio as a measure of effect size to establish the strength of the observed differences.

  3. 3.

    In this chapter, we use ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ interchangeably for the telling of sequences of events.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, University College London, London, UK

    Zsófia Demjén

  2. Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Elena Semino

Authors
  1. Zsófia Demjén
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  2. Elena Semino
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Correspondence to Zsófia Demjén .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Gavin Brookes

  2. School of English, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Daniel Hunt

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Demjén, Z., Semino, E. (2021). Stylistics: Mind Style in an Autobiographical Account of Schizophrenia. In: Brookes, G., Hunt, D. (eds) Analysing Health Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68184-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68184-5_13

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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