Professor Elena Semino

Distinguished Professor

Current Teaching

LING 102: English Language

LING 103: Linguistics

LING 210: Stylistics

LING 450: Stylistics

LING 557: Corpus-based Discourse Analysis

Career Details

Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science.

Visiting Professor at Fuzhou University (China) and La Sapienza University (Rome, Italy).

Fellow of the RSA and the Academy of Social Sciences.

Associate Editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol.

Member and current lead of the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care.

Former Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster: 2011-14 and 2015-18.

Research Overview

My research interests are in health communication, medical humanities, stylistics, and metaphor theory and analysis. In my work I combine qualitative analysis with corpus linguistic methods.

Health communication/medical humanities: representations of autism and mental illness in fictional and non-fictional narratives; metaphor, cancer and the end of life; (figurative) language, creativity and chronic pain; metaphors for Covid-19; discourses around vaccinations.

Stylistics: cognitive stylistics; corpus stylistics; mind style in fiction.

Metaphor theory and analysis: metaphor in literature, politics, science, health communication, end-of-life care; metaphor and embodied simulation; corpus approaches to the study of metaphor.

Research Interests

My research interests are reflected in my recent and current funded projects.

As Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) I apply corpus methods to the study of communication about pain and of first-person accounts of the experience of voice-hearing (the latter in collaboration with Hearing the Voice at Durham University).

I have a long-standing interest in the use of metaphor in communication about cancer. From 2012 to 2014, I was Principal Investigator on the ESRC-funded project Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life. I currently lead the strand on metaphor and cancer within the EU-funded project 4D Picture, which aims to help cancer patients, their families, and healthcare providers better understand their options.

Since 2021, I have worked on discourses around vaccinations, particularly online, as Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project: 'Questioning Vaccination Discourse: A Corpus-based Study' (Quo VaDis).

I am responsible as Co-Investigator for the linguistic strands of the following projects:

‘Improving peer online forums’, funded by the NIHR and led by Fiona Lobban (Lancaster)

‘The future of human reproduction’, funded by Wellcome and led by Stephen Wilkinson (Lancaster).

‘Interventions for better life-time mental health outcomes for young Australians with disability’, funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and led by Anne Kavanagh (Melbourne)

PhD Supervision Interests

Metaphor in discourse: study of metaphor in literature, politics, science and health communication; corpus-based approaches to the study of metaphor. Health communication/Medical Humanities: language use in communication about health and illness, including particularly metaphors and narratives. Cognitive stylistics: integration of linguistic analysis with theories of cognition (e.g. Schema theory, Blending theory) in order to study literary texts; the linguistic construction of fictional text worlds; the linguistic construction of minds in fictional and non-fictional narratives. Corpus stylistics: application of corpus methods to the study of literary texts.