Stress management: Corpus-based insights into vernacular interpretations of "stress"
Abstract
**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: Examination of the term stress in naturally occurring vernacular prose provides evidence of three separate senses being conflated. A corpus analysis of 818 instances of stress from non-academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of American Discourses on Health (CADOH) shows a negative prosody for
stress, which is portrayed variously as a source outside the body, a physical symptom within the body
and an emotional state. The data show that contemporary speakers intermingle the three senses, making
more difficult a discussion between doctors and patients of ways to ‘reduce stress’, when stress might be
interpreted as a stressor, a symptom, or state of anxiety. This conflation of senses reinforces the impression
that stress is pervasive and increasing. In addition, a semantic shift is also refining a new sense for
stress, as post-traumatic stress develops as a specific subtype of emotional stress whose use has increased
in circulation in the past 20 years.