Document Type
Article
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/cam.v10i1.81
Abstract
Examination of the term stress in naturally occurring vernacular prose provides evidence of three separate senses being conflated. A corpus analysis of 818 instances of stress from non-academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of American Discourses on Health (CADOH) shows a negative prosody for stress, which is portrayed variously as a source outside the body, a physical symptom within the body and an emotional state. The data show that contemporary speakers intermingle the three senses, making more difficult a discussion between doctors and patients of ways to ‘reduce stress’, when stress might be interpreted as a stressor, a symptom, or state of anxiety. This conflation of senses reinforces the impression that stress is pervasive and increasing. In addition, a semantic shift is also refining a new sense for stress, as post-traumatic stress develops as a specific subtype of emotional stress whose use has increased in circulation in the past 20 years.
Disciplines
Linguistics | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Publication Date
1-1-2013
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Stvan, Laurel Smith. 2013. “Stress Management: Corpus-Based Insights into Vernacular Interpretations of Stress.” Communication & Medicine 10 (1): 81–93.