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Article published In:
Discourse approaches to evidentiality in Spanish
Edited by Marta Albelda Marco and María Estellés
[Pragmatics and Society 9:3] 2018
► pp. 356–380
Special Issue Section

Evidentiality in illness narratives

Structures with the Spanish verb ver in autobiographical narratives of eating disorders

| University of Barcelona
Narratives of severe mental illness can be regarded as the discursive efforts of a healthy self to restore a sense of selfhood disrupted by the illness. Focusing on a sample of 87 unsolicited online illness narratives of eating disorders in Spanish, this article explores how narrators deployed evidential constructions introduced by the perception verb “ver” (to see) to manage identity in the autobiographical telling. The analysis revealed that “ver” indexed information as coming from different sources (perception, mental states, inference). This evidential material was discursively evaluated (via the adoption of a specific epistemic stance) and applied to construe conflicting versions of self in the eating disorder narratives. Resorting to the evidential marking, narrators could rhetorically negotiate the transition from their perceptual self, created during the illness, to their cognitive self, elaborated in the recovery.
Keywords: evidentiality, illness narratives, epistemic stance, eating disorders, self, perception verbs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentiality in ED narratives
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Sample
    • 3.2Procedure and analysis
  • 4.Evidential structures with ver in online ED narratives
    • 4.1Discourse during the illness: Visual perception and construction of self
    • 4.2Discourse of recovery: From perceptual evidence to cognitive evidence to narrate the self
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.16038.fig
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