Language and cultural influences in the description of pain

Several lines of argument have been pursued in the attempt to study the meanings of pain descriptions in English. First, the component terms of pain descriptions were heuristically classified into primary, secondary, and tertiary groups. Attention was then given to historical features of the primary pain terms. These were handled as morphological structures possessed of a history which has included their entry into the lexicon and their progressive modifications. Besides constituting morphological structures, the primary pain terms are also semantic categories; the history of this 'meaning' dimension was given attention. The sememes which have been bound together with the various primary pain terms were discussed. Brief attention was the given to the contemporary meanings of the secondary and tertiary pain terms. This emphasis on the meanings of the component terms of pain descriptions paved the way for a synchronic analysis of pain descriptions in contemporary English. In this instance, attention was given to the meanings which descriptions of a pain experience seen to have currently. Two modes of analysis were followed. First, the metaphorical roots of pain were explicated. Analyses of the ways in which native speakers use the various pain terms suggest that a 'model' of pain lies behind these descriptions: this model is of a physical process. What pain is being likened to, and what can be likened to pain, in other words, involves a common semantic matrix which is rooted in historical and cultural factors. Many of the sememes originally linked to the various primary pain terms are still 'alive' and implicated when native English speakers describe pain and 'pain-related' phenomena. The sememes which were originally tied to early uses of the primary pain terms no longer have the specific association which they once had with the term; however, it appears that the sememes do enter into the overall contemporary meanings of English pain. Metaphorical transfers implicit in English pain descriptions realize one important semantic component of pain in this language. The second way of analyzing semantic components of English pain involved a grammatical analysis of paradigmatic sentences which realize pain descriptions. A pain experience space was posited on the basis of this grammatical analysis. Each well-formed English sentence describing pain may be seen as associated with a small portion of this space. The sum of the spaces which a pain term can claim constitutes the overall meaning space of that term. The vaious pain terms were associated with different segments of the posited English pain space. It is important that the various spaces of the primary English terms were not sharply bounded and separated one from the other. Instead, the spaces of many terms seemed to be largely contained in the spaces of others...