The embodied non-standard 1SG as a potential marker for reflective function impairment in Anorexia Nervosa sufferers.

Anorexia Nervosa is a grave eating disorder characterised in part by a compromised reflective function—the ability to envision mental states in one’s self and in others. This paper proposes a hybridised referential framework composed of a personal and a social triadic function to better illustrate the representational repercussions of reflective function impairment and concretism on self-representation.This introspection was confronted to empirical investigation of the non-standard first person subject pronoun () usage, the results of which provide preliminary evidence for its potential significance as a marker for Anorexia Nervosa (AN). A corpus of 27K units (words or glyphs) was analyzed with TXM for general statistical analyses, concordances, cooccurrences and colocations, with a control corpus of the same size. Contrary to traditional clinical trials, the findings emphasize the advantages of leveraging digitally mediated data namely collection speed and reduced observer effects. The freedom of expression afforded by social media platforms lends a double, ‘Janusean’ subject pronoun to AN sufferers, and give us insight into Self “othering” in diachronic auto-description.