Reflective function impairment and concretism in online self-representation of Anorexia Nervosa sufferers.

Anorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder characterised in part by a compromised reflective function—adults’ ability to envision mental states in themselves and in others. This paper provides evidence that the typographical variant minuscule first-person subject pronoun, hereafter referred to as NS1sg (), is mobilized for its iconic properties by persons suffering from the psychopathology. The results identify the NS1sg as a potential semantic marker for Anorexia Nervosa and are particularly important as concretism is often a barrier to recovery. Objective: To contribute to the understanding of the linguistic repercussions of reflective function loss through the analysis of the non-standard 1sg as a potential marker of anorexia nervosa. Method: Theoretical and empirical. Proposition of a hybridised referential framework composed of a personal and a social triadic function—to better illustrate the representational repercussions of reflective impairment and concretism on self-representation. Linguistic and statistic analysis of a corpus of 27k anonymized tokens taken from a public online Anorexia Nervosa support page. Results: The NS1sg (i) is significantly (p<0.001, at significance level 0.05) more prevalent in discourse from the Anorexia Nervosa corpus than in the control corpus. Lexical analysis shows some promising evidence of intra-utterance code switching as temporal anaphora.