Why is language so important to the ways that we make sense of anxiety?
This book uses corpus assisted discourse analysis to examine
twenty-three million words of text posted to a forum for people with
anxiety. It shows how linguistic techniques like catastrophisation and
anthropomorphisation can result in very different conceptualisations of
anxiety, as well as how aspects of identity like age, sex and cultural
background can impact on understandings of anxiety and how it ought to
be managed. It tracks the changing identities of posters, from their
first posts to their last, and incorporates a range of corpus-based
techniques to examine the language data, enabling consideration of
interaction between participants and features associated with online
forms of communication like emoji. It ultimately provides a step towards
a better understanding of different responses to anxiety and aims to
promote further engagement with this topic in the field of applied
linguistics.