Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Minority diseases (MS) affect less than 5 cases per 10 000 inhabitants. Generally, their definitive diagnosis takes years to obtain and they show an unfavorable prognosis. The information published on these diseases is essential for their social visibility and for affected people to obtain more resources for basic and clinical research, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. This article has examined the audiovisual information of the Spanish public television TVE from January 1, 2019 to May 9, 2021 on these diseases. Under the framing paradigm, 51 units of analysis have been analyzed. The results show that during the COVID-19 crisis, information on minority diseases has had less echo on Spanish public television and scientific issues have prevailed over those of social denunciation and life stories.

To begin with, we confront the idea of risk with that of danger in the field of gambling: within the framework of a theory of action, taking a risk implies taking a bet that can be won or lost, such as in business or in the challenges that legendary heroes take on. That is the main reason of players’ attraction for the bets, as the sociologist Erving Goffman studied. Now, pathological gambling is a disorder Ludopathy is a mental-behavioral disorder that involves danger: an addiction to uncontrolled gambling with dire personal consequences. The methodology we apply examines three types of social discourses: regulative (legal, administrative, etc.) by which gambling is regulated in Spain; endogenous (testimony of the protagonists of this disorder); exogenous (social representations in literature, cinema or advertising). We propose the thesis that the seduction of immoderate risk endangers the mental health of compulsive gamblers and is a social trauma that different lobbies stimulate and public administrations try to control within the framework of a power struggle. On the other hand, we note that the data related to Spanish legislation regarding gambling has been modified in recent months and that in some respects its application is still in process at the present time.

In this article we present a case of misdiagnosis in mental health that started in the admission interview and lasted for a year of treatment. To interpret the causes of this error, and based on a collaborative process with the mental health team, we use two theoretical categories: “discourse” (understood as the set of semiotic and semantic regularities that correspond to a social field, as in “medical discourse”, etc.) and “voice” (understood as the singular product of the articulation between multiple discourses throughout the biographical trajectory of a person). Methodologically, we use the descriptive tools of conversation analysis in a heterogeneous corpus that goes through the different stages of diagnosis and treatment. The analysis shows the effect of psychoanalytic discourse, which selects some aspects of the patient’s voice while ignoring others, arriving at a diagnosis of conversion disorder (“hysteria”) and preventing another, of progressive aphasia. In the end, the potential of interaction studies for the diagnostic process and some implications of the case for the field of discourse analysis are discussed.

This paper aims to explore the role of personal narratives of long COVID patients within the discursive landscape of the media and social networks. The study is based on a flexible notion of personal narrative, understood as a diffuse and scalar modality (Page) and as a social practice, i.e. as a social activity within a given context, in which different relations of power and ideology converge (De Fina). After defining the features of journalistic news on Facebook, using a socio-cognitive approach to discursive genres (Bhatia; Carranza 2012; Hanks), I will analyse some news about long COVID and the different narrative accounts introduced by both journalists and participants in the virtual communities. Among the results, we will highlight the prominence of the personal narrative in the social debate around health and in the discursive construction of a new disease (Bañón Hernández).

In this essay we will approach the position (stance) that defines the consideration of verbal disability in academic discourse/text. From assessment and categorical point of views that categorise pathologies in a negative way, focusing on what’s lacking, to descriptive approaches that consider the deficit active properties and that facilitate functional performance. Similarly and in parallel to these prescriptive-assessing and analytical-estimate stances, discursive-textual angles of a causalist nature that argue in a privative way about the organical origin of the dysfunction are also examined, an example being the dynamic angles that support the idea of a diversity of factors affecting the enactive nature of the pathologies. As well as giving context to these stances, this work will estimate the impact on the perception on language disorders in Clinical Linguistics.

Language is being systematized as an area of clinical research because it contains features that function as a biomarker for the prediction of psychosis. The aim of the study was to contrast two types of continuity features such as connection, iteration, and referential distance, and, on the other hand, those of verbal fluency, understood as the presence of aberrant pauses. Clinical interviews of 10 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, 10 CHR and 10 healthy controls were analyzed. For the analysis of referentiality, sentence windows were selected and for verbal fluency, 15 minutes of speech were considered. The results suggest the presence of abnormalities in referentiality and verbal fluency among the CHR population. These similarities are found in terms of occurrence and similarity to those of the schizophrenia group, which supports our hypothesis that they are predictive biomarkers.

This paper is part of the DIPURE project, in which researchers from the universities of Almería, Murcia and Cardenal Herrera of Valencia have examined the public discourse on refugees in Spain from different perspectives. On this occasion, our object of study combines migration and health, as we have dealt with the journalistic discourse on the resignation syndrome, which, according to the little research that has been done on it, only affects children who applied for asylum in Sweden. To examine the treatment of the resignation syndrome in the Spanish media, we observed a sample of the written press published from 2015, the year in which the number of refugees in the world began to increase considerably, until June 2021. The study is framed within the hypergenre known as social debate and the main results of the study are structured in three dimensions: the first affects space and time; the second, actors; and the third, evaluations and arguments.

The article is framed in previous studies on oral narratives, specifically, in approaches that conceive conversational activities as a process of (co) construction of the interlocutors (Gülich/ Schöndienst/Surmann; Gülich 2007). I intend to advance in the knowledge of the forms of narrative reconstruction that are used to report cardiac crises, and in the formulation procedures to represent them (Gülich/Kotschi; Brünner/Gülich; Ciapuscio 2003). On the other hand, I study the linguistic resources to verbalize the intensity – mitigation or intensification – of pain and associated symptoms (Mihatsch/Albelda; Albelda/Mihatsch). The exemplary analysis is based on a corpus of six admission interviews between cardiologists and patients, which took place in a public hospital in the Greater Buenos Aires.

The present paper explores the relationship between the concepts of voice (Bachtin) and role (Goffman 1961), and its consequences in the achievement of facework (Goffman 1967) in doctor-patient interaction. On the theoretical basis of Sociocultural Pragmatics (Bravo 2020), three extracts of primary care consultations in Galicia are submitted to a qualitative analysis. The results show that the interactants use voices that are characteristic of their respective roles as doctor and patient, but they exchange also their respective voices or turn to other external voices that are recontextualized in the specific situation. As a discursive strategy, the management of voices is part of the creation of facework, that is, politeness and selfface behaviors that confirm the interactants’ face role. In addition, the analysis shows that voice constitutes a discursive resource that contributes to the updating and redefinition of roles in the interaction.

Hernando del Pulgar’s letters (Letras) have hitherto never been subject to an integral linguistic study. As part of that endeavour, a detailed consideration of two major linguistic aspects of the Letras is offered here. On one hand, a number of morphosyntactic traits are identified which suggest that the 1486 Toledo print is characterised by a perceivable central-western dialectal flavour that can be thought to enjoy considerable prestige at the time. On the other hand, the analysis of morphosyntactic elements related to the domain of communicative distance reveals a moderate use of Latinate constructions typical of highly elaborated 15th-Century Castilian prose, in contrast with a decided favouring of vernacular developments and a notable inclination to linguistic elements with a legal and/or ecclesiastic traditionality. This appears to be in line with both the kind of decorum typically attached to epistolography and the author’s lifelong practice as a royal chancery clerk.