ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 takes a broad focus and examines how schizophrenia is represented in the British press as a whole. To do this, it starts by identifying the most frequent labels used to refer to schizophrenia in the dataset. These include schizophrenia (n.), schizophrenic (adj.) and schizophrenic (n.), which together comprise 96.4% of all explicit references to schizophrenia in the dataset. The analysis then examines a series of word sketches for these words. These provide a semantic profile of each label by grouping collocates together according to their grammatical relationship with the node word. It reveals that each label displays a negative discourse prosody for both “dangerousness” and “acuteness”. The label schizophrenic (n.), in particular, was used negatively and in some contexts was revealed to be used as if it were synonymous with “dangerous”.
