Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides healthcare communication, and particularly work on communication about cancer and the end of life, and corpus linguistics and its methods. It focuses on research on metaphor in discourse and recent methodological and theoretical developments. The book draws the three separate threads together by discussing corpus-based and computational approaches to metaphor, and previous research on metaphors in communication about illness/cancer and dying. It presents the two most frequent types of metaphors: Violence metaphors and Journey metaphors. The book also presents three important topic areas that are often expressed metaphorically the relationship between patients and healthcare professionals; the notions of a 'good' and a 'bad' death; and the emotions of bereaved family carers. It provides a striking and relevant phenomenon in the patient data, namely humour in metaphor use.