Framing mental health: a corpus-assisted study of Hong Kong legislative discourse

This study examines the framing of “mental health” in Hong Kong legislative discourse. It draws on a 15.7-million-word corpus of the English-language Hansard of the Sixth Legislative Council (2016–2021) and combines collocation and concordance analysis with analyses of semantic preference and semantic prosody. Collocation analysis identified five semantic clusters: (1) a holistic health framework, (2) service infrastructure and support systems, (3) educational context, (4) preventive and promotional strategies, and (5) problem identification and assessment. Concordance analysis revealed two dominant themes, namely the institutional management of services and educational initiatives for promotion. Across the two themes, the construction in which “mental health” occurred carried two dominant semantic prosodies: positive and aspirational prosody, where mental health was the object of an awareness process; and deficit-oriented prosody, where mental health was incorporated in a person-denoting nominal group. These findings describe a record in which the government is the primary agent of mental health policy, supported by other agencies. The study contributes to corpus-assisted studies on institutional discourse and mental health.