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Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across genres
Edited by Carolina Figueras Bates and Adrián Cabedo
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 290] 2018
► pp. 73–106

Chapter 4
Performing the self in illness narratives

The role of evidentiality

| University of Barcelona

Narrating the personal experience of a chronic illness poses the challenge of reflecting on epistemic states and sources of evidence that shape the person´s past, present and future selves. To explore the role of evidentials in different illness stories, 32 unsolicited narratives of eating disorders (ED), 28 accounts of borderline personality disorder (BPD), and 29 testimonies of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) were selected from the Internet. The analysis revealed that, in ED narratives, the enactment of the self was realized via visual perception, and the body was construed as self. In BPD narratives, inner emotional states were adopted as the source of evidence, and the mood was defined as self. In CFS narratives, the evidence informing the self came from embodied perception, and sensations were understood as self. Evidentials, therefore, are genre-sensitive and develop particular discursive functions in different illness narratives.

Keywords: evidentiality, illness narratives, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Evidentiality and construction of self in ED, BPD and CFS narratives
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Sample
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Self and evidentiality in ED narratives
    • 3.2Self and evidentiality in BPD narratives
    • 3.3Self and evidentiality in CFS narratives
  • 4.Discussion and concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.290.04bat
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