Framing Narratives of Suffering through Metaphors

This paper aims to describe narratives of domestic violence, as found on healthtalk.org (an online platform created with the aim of helping other people in a similar situation to fill a cognitive and emotional gap), in order to detect how suffering is framed in discourse. The linguistic relation between state of mind and affect can be narratively framed through metaphorical discursive patterns. The aim of this paper is to detect these metaphorical features in abused people’s narratives that best express their experiential cognitive awareness. The quantitative investigation, carried out with WMatrix, and the qualitative analysis underpin the metaphorical patterns evidenced in the described narratives. As will be see, despite various metaphors are employed in these narratives, the leitmotif supporting all these narratives is that change is motion while states are locations – the possibility for change is only given to abused people when external forces are at stake.