ABSTRACT Since the publication of Susan Sontag’s highly influential Illness as Metaphor in 1978, many studies have provided follow-up analyses on her critique of metaphors for cancer, but none have investigated her claims about the uses and implications of cancer as a metaphor (e.g., the cancer of corruption), and her prediction that medical advances would make this metaphor obsolete. In this article, we present the first systematic study of cancer as a metaphor in contemporary English. We show the forms, frequencies, and functions of 925 metaphorical uses of cancer-related vocabulary in two large English language corpora, and discuss their implications for: (a) the framing of the phenomena that are most frequently described as cancers and of potential courses of action to be taken in relation to these phenomena; (b) perceptions of cancer itself; and (c) theoretical accounts of what makes a metaphor successful, in terms of its effectiveness and its applicability to a wide range of topics. In this way, we provide detailed evidence, and additional nuance, for Sontag’s critique of cancer as a metaphor and put forward an explanation for the current persistence of this metaphor, despite its controversial status.

中文翻译：

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作为隐喻的癌症

摘要 自从 1978 年苏珊·桑塔格 (Susan Sontag) 极具影响力的疾病作为隐喻出版以来，许多研究都对她对癌症隐喻的批评进行了后续分析，但没有一项研究调查了她关于癌症作为隐喻的用途和含义的主张（例如，腐败的癌症），以及她对医学进步将使这个比喻过时的预测。在本文中，我们首次将癌症作为当代英语的隐喻进行系统研究。我们在两个大型英语语料库中展示了 925 种癌症相关词汇的隐喻用法的形式、频率和功能，并讨论了它们对以下方面的影响：(a) 最常被描述为癌症的现象和潜在过程的框架对这些现象采取的行动；(b) 对癌症本身的看法；(c) 关于隐喻成功的原因的理论解释，包括其有效性和对广泛主题的适用性。通过这种方式，我们为桑塔格对癌症作为隐喻的批评提供了详细的证据和额外的细微差别，并为这个隐喻目前的持续存在提供了解释，尽管它的地位存在争议。