The Hero of Caregiving: A Cognitive Approach to Identity and Positioning in Caregivers’ English Narratives

This study investigates how caregivers position themselves and how they construct their identities via narrating. It aims at highlighting cohesion and topical coherence in caregiving narratives that enable the hearer/reader to better interpret events and experiences. Bamberg’s narrative model with its linguistic based approach and its cognitive based approach is used to attain such objectives. The results show that cohesiveness is created in the narratives through the use of references as well as the use of the nominal grounding elements. Topical cohesiveness is attained through Bamberg’s cognitive based approach. Transitivity analysis, clausal grounding, Bamberg’s notion of identity, and his three levels of positioning are used to reveal how the narrators construct their identities and position themselves. The most frequently used level is level three in which the narrators position themselves to themselves. In addition, narrators are mostly identified as agents.