A Study On Chinese Cancer Patients’ Self-Narratives From The Perspective Of Framing Theory

Under the leadership of the “Healthy China” strategy,more and more people are paying attention to the topic of “health”,and “health discourse” has become an object of study in discourse research and other fields(Ran Yongping & Wei Minwen,2020).While the development of medical technology has improved the possibility of cancer patients being cured,the image of cancer patients has mainly been constructed through mainstream medical discourse and media discourse,with less attention paid to the cancer patients’ own self-narrative discourse,resulting in a lack of exploration into their inner world.Framing theory is commonly used to analyze political discourse with more obvious ideological tendencies,but few scholars have used this theory to analyze patients’ discourse and listen to their voices.Therefore,this paper takes the self-narrative discourse of cancer patients on the online platform “Tianya Hospital” as the research object,and uses Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory(1980)and framing theory(2004),and the critical metaphor analysis method(Charteris-Black,2004),to construct an analysis framework suitable for analyzing cancer patients’ self-narrative discourse,with the aim of helping us listen to their voices,understand how they share their cancer experience,and provide insights for communicating with cancer patients.Based on this,this study attempts to answer:(1)What surface frames are commonly constructed in selected cancer patients’ narratives?(2)What deep frames are activated by surface frames in selected cancer patients’ narratives to show their views and values?(3)What framing strategies are reflected in cancer patients’ self-narratives?In terms of research methods,this study is mainly qualitative,including qualitative and quantitative research.In the quantitative research stage,during the identification phase,the tool Ant Conc 4.1.4 will be used to count metaphorical and non-metaphorical keywords,while Charteris-Black’s concept of “source domain resonance”(2004)will be used for quantitative analysis,to calculate the total number,total frequency,and resonance of different conceptual metaphors.In the qualitative research aspect,the Metaphor Identification Procedure(MIP)(Pragglejaz Group,2007)will be used to identify metaphorical words and expressions in the data,while surface frames in the narratives will be summarized and deep frames will be inferred,on which framing strategies communication suggestions will be based.Based on word frequency statistics,the non-metaphorical surface frames present in the discourse of Chinese cancer patients mainly include: “treatment frame”,“illness frame”,“positive frame” and “relation frame”,with the treatment frame being the most obvious frame,which corresponds to the main topic of cancer patients’ narratives in the online platform,i.e.,talking more about their cancer treatment than personal life.By counting metaphorical keywords and using the MIP identification method,the metaphorical surface frames are summarized as follows: “war frame”,“living organism frame”,“journey frame”,“business frame”,“nature frame”,“test frame”,“performance frame”,“game frame”,“criminal frame”,“building frame”,and “machine frame”.These metaphorical surface frames indicate that Chinese cancer patients also tend to use the war frame,which is consistent with the research of Semino et al.(2007)on English-speaking patients,and Maga(?)a & Matlock(2018)and Maga(?)a et al.(2019)on Spanish-speaking patients.Take Chinese social culture background into consideration,deep frames activated by surface ones can be summarized as: “passive-patients image”,“precious-life view”,“take-it-courageously belief” and “filial-piety-first philosophy”.By analyzing framing strategies applied in cancer patients’ narratives,it is found that non-metaphorical surface frames are used to activate somatic markers,metaphorical surface frames are used as a persuasive tool and deep frames are used to resonate with public’s common views,finally to achieve the function of encouragement and persuasion.The paper explores the analysis framework from the perspective of framing theory,combined with Charteris-Black’s method(2004),as an extension of critical metaphor analysis.It is an effective attempt to view cancer patients’ expressions from their own perspective,which breaks away from the mainstream discourse of constructing patient images.It is also a beneficial attempt to combine the framing theory with localized Chinese language.