ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy, known informally as the “talking cure”, is a verbally constituted mental health activity practiced in many contemporary societies. The role of therapists (or counselors) is to apply clinical methods and interpersonal stances to assist clients (or patients) to modify their behaviors, cognitions, emotions and/or other personal characteristics in mutually desired directions (Norcross, 1990). There are many different psychotherapy approaches (Prochaska & Norcross, 2009) with examples like cognitive behavioral therapy and psychoanalysis leaving considerable footprints in popular culture. Notwithstanding differences from psychological points of view, their common interactional and linguistic nature has long made psychotherapy a prime context to examine issues in many areas of language study. These include sociolinguistics (Ferrara, 1994; Labov & Fanshel, 1977), conversation analysis (Peräkylä, Antaki, Vehviläinen, & Leudar, 2011), (critical) discourse analysis (Avdi & Georgaca, 2007) and pragmatics (Mondada, 2010). The potential clinical implications of such analyses have also been highlighted in the psychotherapy literature (O’Reilly & Lester, 2016; Spong, 2010). Language and discourse features like topic shifts (Sutherland & Strong, 2011), modalizers (Martinez, Tomicic, & Medina, 2012) and indeed metaphor (Tay, 2013) are seen by therapists as reflecting therapeutic processes or marking client change. To the extent that languages uniquely characterize different cultural populations, linguistic analysis of psychotherapy talk has the further potential of contributing to cross-cultural psychotherapy research (Dwairy, 2015).
