Handelen in behandeling : een taalkundig-stilistisch onderzoek naar correlaties tussen taalgebruik en welzijn

The aim of this article is to show what a linguistic-stylistic approach can offer
for the study of correlations between language use and well-being, in which
quantitative and qualitative analysis go hand in hand. As a case study, we
investigate whether there are differences in the language used by recovered
and non-recovered adolescents who followed the online FitNet treatment for
chronic fatique syndrome (CFS). More specifically, we analyzed whether there
are differences between both groups in their use of five linguistic means that
hide agency. Our results indicate that this is the case indeed: non-recovered
patients used these linguistic means more often than recovered patients.
In addition, both patient groups show a different development during the
therapy: while non-recovered patients increased their use of these stylistic
phenomena during the treatment, recovered patients decreased their use
of these same phenomena. As such, our study shows that there is indeed a
correlation between the use of certain formulations in the language used
by patients with CFS and (a change in) their well-being. It is argued that the
linguistic means that we investigated, could not have been analysed with
a purely computational approach, and that a linguistic-stylistic approach is
thus of added value for studying correlations between language use and
recovery.