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Eva Gredel

„Wenn der Körper ausbrennt“ – Burn-out: Sprachliche und semiotische Strategien zur Aushandlung eines Krankheitsbildes

Abstract This paper analyses the linguistic and semiotic strategies in the negotiation processes concerning a disease pattern: Placed in the 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger in the scientific discourse of psychology, today the term “burn-out syndrome” not only characterizes popular scientific texts, but has also become a widely discussed social issue. Negotiations of this term are dominated by a set of metaphors that allow protagonists in the field of medicine to express their perspectives on the phenomenon. Corpus evidence sheds light on how scientific findings, theories and paradigms are developed and popularised with the help of linguistic constructions that are not stable, but dynamic.

In this paper, I present the findings of a corpus-based study of metaphorical patterns used to refer to the burn-out syndrome. The analyzed corpus contains more than 10 000 newspaper articles and a collection of popular scientific publications concerning the burn-out syndrome. The paper draws an outline of the variety of innovative metaphors in newspaper articles as a transtextual phenomenon in the light of Foucauldian discourse analysis, and elaborates not only on verbal metaphors but also on multicodal metaphors. Consequently, I suggest the enhancement of Foucauldian discourse analyses with regard to multicodal texts.