Illness-conceptions in the persuasive sections of Hungarian medical recipes from the 16th and 17th centuries
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Ágnes Kuna
Abstract
Illnesses and their names constitute a significant indicator of cultural levels, as they reveal a lot about the convictions, healing practices as well as the general state of medicine. Besides the naming of illnesses, their conceptualizations are also present in certain genres and text sections, which are, in turn, associated with specific functions. The present paper outlines illness-conceptions in 16th and 17th-century Hungarian medical recipes by means of a qualitative analysis of seven contemporary manuscripts in a cognitive linguistic framework.
The investigation takes the schema of the recipes as the analytical framework, as it was one of the most typical genre within the medical discourse domain in the 16th and 17th centuries. A recurring topic of recipes is usefulness, which is elaborated along the ‘how-to-do-it’ function. We can observe three functional units in the text construction: the initiator, the instructional unit and the persuasion. The conceptual elaboration of illnesses typically occurs in the first and third units. In the initiators, it manifests through the names and symptoms of illnesses, while in the persuasive sections through the description of how the illness departs. The present paper concentrates on this last aspect and gives a detailed description of the conceptual categories concerning the departure of the disease (cleansing, easing, soothing, stopping, starting etc.), their frequency and co-ocurrence. The research attempts to give a discourse pragmatic approach to the topic, expanding on the semantic analysis based on the names of illnesses and the symptoms.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- Masthead
- Editorial
- Frames and constructions enhance text coherence: The case of DNI resolutions in spoken discourse
- Information status and English relative constructions: A corpus-based study of Japanese learners in spoken language
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- Figurative processes in meaning interpretation: A case study of novel English compounds
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