Vernacular Explanations of Causation in Lay Health Discourse
Abstract
Few linguistic works exam vernacular terms for health concepts rather than technical medical terms (cf. Rueda-Baclig & Florencio 2003). The prevalence of conversations on food, sleep, exercise, and illness – and the ordinariness of the words – leads to aspects of lexical misinterpretation remaining understudied. Lay terms with multiple senses are studied here to determine effects on misunderstanding of causality in health discussions.