Jezik boli – između epistemološke asimetrije i biološki zadane društvenosti
The Language of Pain – between the Epistemological Asymmetry and the Biologically Determined Sociability

Summary/Abstract: Since pain, as a phenomenon, is accessible only to the person who experiences it (which represents an obstacle to the objective categorization in the linguistic medium), when patients want to make it available to their interlocutors, they describe it with very detailed and elaborate metaphorical scenarios, most often those relating to a form of body damage. Using such embodied metonymic and metaphorical definitions, they provide an adequate imaginative simulation of their subjective experience for their recipients. The paper presents an overview of philosophical insights on the phenomenology of pain as well as a review of contemporary neuroscience research on a social dimension of pain, but also the results of cognitive linguistic analysis of pain vocabulary based on descriptors from the McGill Questionnaire as well as on the corpus of authentic doctor-patient dialogues.

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