Our research explored the social representations of the ‘vegetative state’ across different cultural (India, Italy, and the UK) and social milieus (left-leaning, right-leaning, and religious/tabloid newspapers). The aim was to discover how public discourse engages liminality between life and death. Qualitative and quantitative text analyses were conducted on news headlines and full-texts from British (n = 300), Indian (n = 300), and Italian (n = 300) newspapers published between January 1990 and June 2019. Our study shows three results: (a) the vegetative state is a potentially global issue that remains discussed with local timing and characteristics; (b) it is commonly represented in eight frames of different resonance across cultural milieus; (c) the news flows are organised on different dimensions (quality, political, and ideological). Results shed light on how liminality is discursively managed by the interplay of cultural resources and social positionings. In particular, this suggests a hitherto unrecognised function of the objectification process: personification as position-taking.

中文翻译：

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了解临界条件：比较“植物人状态”的新兴表征

我们的研究探讨了“植物人”在不同文化（印度、意大利和英国）和社会环境（左倾、右倾和宗教/小报）中的社会表征。目的是发现公共话语如何在生与死之间进行限制。对 1990 年 1 月至 2019 年 6 月期间出版的英国 (n = 300)、印度 (n = 300) 和意大利 (n = 300) 报纸的新闻标题和全文进行了定性和定量文本分析。我们的研究显示了三个结果: (a) 植物人是一个潜在的全球性问题，仍需根据当地的时间和特点进行讨论；(b) 它通常表现在跨越文化环境的八个不同共鸣的框架中；(c) 新闻流按不同维度（质量、政治和意识形态）进行组织。结果揭示了文化资源和社会定位的相互作用如何对阈值进行话语管理。特别是，这表明了客体化过程的一个迄今为止未被认识到的功能：拟人化作为立场。