The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain is third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant uses of the folk concept of pain are from a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way we talk about pain from a first-person perspective: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides new insights into ordinary pain language and poses an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain.

中文翻译：

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疼痛语言学：多元主义的一个案例

理解疼痛概念语义的最常见方法是第三人称思维实验。相比之下，民间对疼痛概念最频繁和最相关的使用是从对话环境中的第一人称视角。在本文中，我们使用一组语言工具从第一人称视角系统地探索人们在报告疼痛时所交流的语义。我们的结果表明，只有多元观点才能公正地看待我们从第一人称视角谈论疼痛的方式：民间疼痛概念的语义内容包括有关不愉快感觉和破坏性身体状态的信息。因此，疼痛语言学提供了对普通疼痛语言的新见解，并对主流的单一疼痛观点提出了有趣的挑战。