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In recent years corpus linguistic tools have afforded language researchers and health practitioners a powerful method to learn about the linguistic character of health-related communication in a variety of contexts. This chapter charts recent developments in the burgeoning field of corpus-based health communication research and presents a series of studies which aptly illustrate the utility of corpus linguistic techniques for undertaking in-depth, quantitative and qualitative examinations of health-related language data. The overarching argument of this chapter is one in favour of the use of corpus linguistic techniques, which, we argue, are capable of providing revealing insights about how people conceptualize and discursively construct their subjective experiences and understandings of health and illness.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-49616-4_9

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