Word Choice and Collocates of Doka and Martin’s Grieving Styles

It has been over two decades since the concepts of instrumental and intuitive grief have entered the field of grief and loss. In this time, there has not been a study that attempts to understand the language used among these two grief styles until now. In this study, a corpus linguistic program called #Lancsbox was used to analyze the collocates of the top words found in each grief style. Results of this study show that the word “death” is exclusive to the top words of instrumental grief over its counterpart. Contrary to what one would expect from the cognitively-oriented instrumental griever, node words such as “like” offered collocates of emotions, while words high in intensity were collocates among the intuitive grief vignettes. This study contributes to the field of grief work and includes several implications for both counseling and research, both of which are provided to the reader. Keywords: graphcoll, collocation, grief, Doka, Martin, corpus linguistics