A linguistic analysis of transitivity in delusional speech: A case study

• Lepesqueur, Marcus ^[1] ; Tenuta, Adriana Maria ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

     Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

     Brasil

     
• Localización: Ciências & Cognição, ISSN-e 1806-5821, Año 21, Vol. 2, 2016 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Ciências & Cognição), págs. 213-229
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article presents results of a research that investigated some syntactic and semantic aspects of the expression of delusional events in the discourse of a person with schizophrenia. Based on Cognitive Linguistics (CL), we analyzed 1104 clause units taken from her speech. The case analyzed shows a specific linguistic syntactic pattern related to the expression of delusional events. Results indicate a highly significant relation between the transitive construction and the clause units involving delusional entities (?²(1, N=98) = 45.097, p<.0001) and also a significant difference in the mean of transitivity rate in these clause units (t(80)=2.71, p=.008). These results were interpreted as evidence of a schematic conceptual core, i.e. a prototypical schematic cognitive structure associated to delusion. These findings suggest, albeit in a preliminary way, the possibility of description of delusion also on a linguistic basis. Key words: delusion; schizophrenia; cognitive linguistics; transitivity; grammatical constructions.