Differences in Grieving: A Corpus Linguistics Study of Grief from Self-Focused Mortality Versus Other-Focused Mortality

This study aimed to perform a contextual analysis around the most salient words concerning the processing of one’s own demise to distinguish between self-focused and other-focused grief. The study examined the discourse around mortality through corpus linguistic analyses involving the keyness and collocations of keywords in memoirs written by those processing the death of a loved one versus memoirs written by individuals dying of terminal illness. The corpus linguistics software AntConc was used to perform keyness analyses, and the software #Lancsbox 6.0 was utilized to perform collocation analyses. Keyness was determined using the log likelihood ratio test for frequency and dispersion. Strength of collocation was measured by means of the log Dice calculation. The top positive keywords distinguishing self-focused memoirs from other-focused memoirs were found to be “member,” “despair,” and “uncertainty.” The most infrequent keyword in self-focused grief memoirs was the word “grief,” suggesting disenfranchisement of the expression of sadness. The collocates of “despair” were “anger,” “exist,” and “fear,” denoting existential apprehension as a discourse theme. The words “future,” “life,” and “cancer” were found to be the top collocates for the positive keyword “uncertainty,” indicating a sense of unpredictability about life and worsening terminal illness. Collocations of the words “death,” and “grief” showed burstiness, implying urgency of the message. The complex emotions around existential ambiguities concerning the loss of one’s own life along with the muting of the expression of grief are discussed in terms of clinical and research implications.