Health Communication and Corpus Linguistics: Using Corpus Tools to Analyse Eating Disorder Discourse Online

Abstract

This chapter aims to show readers how corpus linguistics techniques can be used to analyse an important domain of discourse: health communication — and in particular online discourse relating to the increasing problem of eating disorders. Using a number of staple corpus techniques (keyword, collocation and concordance analyses) we identify and describe the salient linguistic features through which people express their concerns about eating disorders and therewith negotiate anorexic identities. In the process we reveal how quantitatively dominant lexical signatures identified by corpus-driven analysis can also be shown to be qualitatively dominant by closer discourse analysis. Furthermore, our study provides insight into the personal experiences of people with eating disorders, and thus demonstrates the utility of a corpus approach for making sense of complex psychological health concerns.

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