A corpus-assisted analysis of language convergence and meaning divergence of ‘mental health’ in Asian countries

Abstract

There has been an increased use of the term ‘mental health’ to refer to more negative states or ‘mental illness’. This study examines the language and meanings associated with ‘mental health’ in English-language newspapers across five Asian countries: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and China. The aim is to identify the common words used to discuss mental health and to assess the extent to which these words reflect their common definitional meanings across different cultural contexts. Methodologically, the study integrates language convergence and meaning divergence approaches with corpus linguistics to analyse the newspapers. The findings reveal that ‘mental health’ is frequently collocated with words such as ‘issues’, ‘problems’, ‘services’, ‘support’, ‘physical’, and ‘people’ across the Asian news corpora. It is found that these collocates often diverge from their definitional meanings and are often used in reference to more negative mental states across the Asian news corpora.

Keywords

Mental health / Asian / Newspapers / Corpus / Collocates

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Theng Theng Ong: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

This is to declare that the paper has been written without conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), the University of Nottingham, Malaysia (UNM) under FASS Pump Priming Scheme 2022 (Grant code: F0016.54.04.). I would like to express my sincere gratitude to UNM for their financial support, which made this work possible.

I would also like to thank Robert McKenzie from Northumbria University and Melissa Yoong from the University of Nottingham Malaysia for their valuable advice and support in helping me complete this study.

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

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