Helga Mannsåker

This PhD-project is a diachronic, qualitative examination of the metaphors used in Scandinavian textbooks of psychiatry in the period from 1900 to present day. I will read and compare textbooks from circa 1900, circa 1950 and circa 2010. In order to limit the text material, I will focus on only one diagnosis: schizophrenia.

The theories on which I base my project are part of the research tradition of Cognitive Linguistics. The most relevant theories for my project are the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson, and Grady’s theory about Primary Metaphor. These theories claim that linguistic metaphors are manifestations of conceptual metaphors. Our conceptual system is mainly metaphorical; we use metaphors to make sense of and to refer to the world around us. We use a concrete source domain in order to understand a more abstract target domain. One example is the use of the domain of sight in order to conceptualize the domain of understanding, manifested in utterances like: “I see.”(=’ I understand.’) It is claimed that metaphor is not just a linguistic phenomenon, it is a cognitive strategy. By studying language use it is therefore possible to get an insight in how thoughts and ideas are organized. 

My PhD-project is a further development of my master thesis: a synchronic comparison of the use of metaphor in a psychiatric textbook, in a popular science book on psychiatry and in a chat room for people diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. I discovered that the differences between the texts were mostly stylistic; the conceptual metaphors in the three texts were mainly the same.

My hypothesis is that the same applies for texts from different time periods: changes in metaphor use are mostly stylistic. Even though psychiatry’s theoretical models for understanding the human mind changes as a result of research, our conceptual system have some basic ways of dealing with abstract concepts like the mind and psychiatric disorders that are not subject to radical change through time. 

In my PhD-project I will examine what kind of metaphors have been used in order to describe the human mind and psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia) in textbooks for physicians in the period between 1900 and 2010. Has the use of conceptual metaphors changed substantially, that is; has some conceptual metaphors disappeared and new ones arrived, or are the changes minimal? Has the linguistic manifestations of the conceptual metaphors changed substantially? What motivates the use of the different conceptual metaphors?

I will use the so-called semasiological route: first identify linguistic metaphors in the texts and then identify the target and source domains of the conceptual metaphors on which the metaphoric expressions are based. My operational definition of linguistic metaphor is: a word used about a domain distinctly different from the domain the basic meaning of the word refers to.

Mannsåker works at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic studies.