Metaphor in end-of-life care
Welcome to the MELC project website
The primary aim of this project is to investigate the use of metaphor in the experience of end-of-life care in the UK. A systematic analysis will be conducted of the metaphors used by members of different stakeholder groups (patients, unpaid family carers and healthcare professionals) in a 1.5-million-word corpus consisting of interviews and contributions to online fora. Ethical approval for the use of these data sets has been obtained. The secondary aim of this project is to investigate the implications of the use of metaphor in the data for existing descriptions and theories of metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon. The method that will be employed to identify and analyse metaphor in the data is both qualitative and quantitative. The most innovative aspect of this method is the exploitation of the semantic annotation tool within the online software tool Wmatrix, which will make it possible to identify metaphorical expressions more systematically than is currently possible with other corpus-based methods for the study of metaphor in large data sets. The findings of the project will ultimately be relevant to the provision of end-of-life care, and to the consultancy for, and training of, health professionals.
For more information about the project, see the links on the left and our introductory videos on the background page.
