37.3487, Confs: Theme Session at ICLC18: The Language of Pain (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3487. Fri 23 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3487, Confs: Theme Session at ICLC18: The Language of Pain (Germany)

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Date: 21-Oct-2026
From: Saskia van Putten [saskia.vanputten2 at ru.nl]
Subject: Theme Session at ICLC18: The Language of Pain


Theme Session at ICLC18: The Language of Pain
Short Title: ICLC 18
Theme: The Language of Pain

Date: 20-Aug-2027 - 24-Aug-2027
Location: Erlangen, Germany
Contact: Rafael Soto Setzke & Saskia van Putten
Contact Email: saskia.vanputten2 at ru.nl
Meeting URL: https://www.iclc18.fau.de/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 08-Dec-2026

The desire to understand one’s pain in order to find its cause is
probably universal to all humans, across the globe, and across time.
However, while the effect of noxious (pain-inducing) stimuli on
individuals—such as receiving a burn from a hot object or being
pricked by a needle—can be observed and retraced in detail on a purely
neurological level, today’s usual consensus is that “activity induced
in the nociceptor and nociceptive pathways by a noxious stimulus is
not pain” (Raja et al. 2020: 1977), and that instead, pain should be
seen as a “personal experience that is influenced to varying degrees
by biological, psychological, and social factors” (see also Cohen et
al. 2018; Craig and MacKenzie 2021). This also implies that pain
cannot be measured objectively, and the most reliable way to find out
about another person's pain is through verbal and non-verbal
communication—or, in other words, by using language (Speed and Majid
2020; Wierzbicka 2012).
Today, however, the field of pain language research is still
relatively young, especially when it comes to studies conducted with a
linguistic focus. This may be related to factors such as the
difficulty of eliciting pain language and the challenge of
cross-linguistic comparison given cultural differences in what is and
is not pain. Nonetheless, a growing number of contributions apply,
adapt, and create new linguistic frameworks for the study of
pain-related expressions. Studies have investigated the various
grammatical ways of construing pain (Halliday 1998; Lascaratou 2007),
how pain is expressed through lexical means including pain-specific
words and metaphors (Diller 1980; Munday et al. 2023; Semino et al.
2026), semantic ratings of pain-related words (Akita 2025; Borelli et
al. 2018), cross-linguistic commonalities in expressions of pain
(Ponsonnet 2025; Reznikova et al. 2012), differences in pain
expression across social and cultural groups (Abedini 2025; Jaworska
and Ryan 2018), and multimodal aspects of pain descriptions, such as
the use of gestures and other visual cues (Rowbotham et al. 2012;
Semino 2010).
Still, much more research is needed in order to obtain a fuller
picture of how pain is expressed and conceptualized within and across
cultures and how it is communicated both in clinical and in
non-clinical settings. In light of these developments and open
questions, this theme session aims to bring together researchers
working on the language of pain.
Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following
questions:
 - How is pain conceptualized (both from a social and cultural
viewpoint)?
 - How does pain language differ across cultures and/or other
sub-groups?
 - How do we communicate immediate pain experience?
 - How do we describe past pain events?
 - How do children acquire pain language?
 - How have pain-related expressions emerged historically?
 - What is the multi-modal nature of pain language (e.g. the role of
gestures, prosody, facial expression)?
 - How is pain communicated in clinical settings?
 - How is pain experience conveyed through diagnostic material (e.g.
pain questionnaires for people with chronic pain)?
 - How can pain expressions be translated in language interpreting?
Abstracts (500 words exc. references and figures) can be submitted via
the ICLC website: https://www.iclc18.fau.de/. Select the theme session
TS9 – The Language of Pain among the options when submitting.
References :
Abedini, H. 2025. Pain expression and intercultural identity: a
comparison between English and Persian among EFL learners.
Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education 10(1).
Akita, Kimi. 2025. Ideophones are more reliable than metaphors in
Japanese pain descriptions. Language and Cognition 17. e7.
Borelli, Eleonora, Davide Crepaldi, Carlo Adolfo Porro & Cristina
Cacciari. 2018. The psycholinguistic and affective structure of words
conveying pain. PLOS ONE 13(6). e0199658.
Cohen, Milton, John Quintner & Simon van Rysewyk. 2018. Reconsidering
the International Association for the Study of Pain definition of
pain. PAIN Reports 3(2). e634.
Craig, K. D. & N. E. MacKenzie. 2021. What is pain: Are cognitive and
social features core components? Paediatr Neonatal Pain 3(3). 106–118.
Diller, Anthony. 1980. Cross-cultural pain semantics:. Pain 9(1).
9–26.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1998. On the grammar of pain. Functions of Language
5(1). 1–32.
Jaworska, Sylvia & Kath Ryan. 2018. Gender and the language of pain in
chronic and terminal illness: A corpus-based discourse analysis of
patients' narratives. Social Science & Medicine 215. 107–114.
Lascaratou, Chryssoula. 2007. The language of pain : expression or
description? Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Munday, Imogene, Toby Newton-John & Ian Kneebone. 2023. Clinician
experience of metaphor in chronic pain communication. Scandinavian
Journal of Pain 23(1). 88–96.
Ponsonnet, Maïa. 2025. The semantic typology of expressive
interjections: colexifications in pain, disgust and joy interjections
across languages. Lingua 324. 103979.
Raja, Srinivasa N., Daniel B. Carr, Milton Cohen, Nanna B. Finnerup,
Herta Flor, Stephen Gibson, Francis J. Keefe, Jeffrey S. Mogil,
Matthias Ringkamp, Kathleen A. Sluka, Xue-Jun Song, Bonnie Stevens,
Mark D. Sullivan, Perri R. Tutelman, Takahiro Ushida & Kyle Vader.
2020. The revised International Association for the Study of Pain
definition of pain: concepts, challenges, and compromises. Pain
161(9). 1976–1982.
Reznikova, Tatiana, Ekaterina V. Rakhilina & Anastasia
Bonch-Osmolovskaya. 2012. Towards a typology of pain predicates.
Linguistics 50(3). 421–465.
Rowbotham, Samantha, Judith Holler, Donna Lloyd & Alison Wearden.
2012. How Do We Communicate About Pain? A Systematic Analysis of the
Semantic Contribution of Co-speech Gestures in Pain-focused
Conversations. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 36(1). 1–21.
Semino, Elena. 2010. Descriptions of Pain, Metaphor, and Embodied
Simulation. Metaphor and Symbol 25(4). 205–226.
Semino, Elena, Yufeng Liu & Jane Demmen. 2026. Metaphors and
identities on an online forum dedicated to pain. [Journal article].
Communication and Medicine.
Speed, Laura J. & Asifa Majid. 2020. Grounding language in the
neglected senses of touch, taste, and smell. Cognitive Neuropsychology
37(5-6). 363–392.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2012. Is pain a human universal? A cross-linguistic
and cross-cultural perspective on pain. Emotion Review 4(3). 307–317.


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