الفهرس 
Theoretical FrameworkOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Digital discourse has been home to patients blogging about their experience with their disorder as a therapeutic approach that aids them in making sense of their experience. Patients who suffer from memory related disorders, including mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, Alzheimer’s (AD) patients, and other patients, are often advised to narrate their experience, which in turn acts as a window to the patients’ view on their experience and the way such experience is structured in their minds. This study aims at exploring the image schemas that manifest themselves in the blog narratives of MCI patients and AD patients. It is argued that this analysis can be a tool in the linguistic identification of the disorder. The data includes 20 narratives, 10 from each patients’ blog narratives. The method of analysis adopted is qualitative with a few statistical figures. The researcher has analyzed them using Gee’s narrative approach (1991) and Evans and Green’s (2006) approach to image schemas. The researcher has identified some repeated thematic patterns, where AD patients’ narratives center on themes pertaining to their experience with disorder symptoms, such as their lack of purpose, sense of nothingness, and brain fog, whereas MCI patients’ narratives focus on the patients’ experience with the diagnosis, their reaction to the diagnosis, information about the disorder and its symptoms, the fluctuation in their emotions and how they are adopting a positive approach towards the disorder. The researcher has also noted some repetitive syntactic patterns in the narrative structure of the selected narratives that are observed through AD patients’ repeated use of the conjunctions “and” and “but” in their later stages and the misuse of ellipses, while the decline of MCI patients’ condition is observed in the repetition of the conjunctions “so” and “but”, and the decline in the use of temporal deixis. In terms of image schemas, the researcher has identified FORCE schema as the most prevailing image schema in mild cognitive impairment patients’ narratives and EXISTENCE schema being the most dominant image schema in Alzheimer’s patients’ narratives. This study is especially significant as it fills the gap in cognitive linguistic literature on neurodegenerative disorders. The study could inform interdisciplinary studies of a linguistic manifestation of neurodegenerative disorders. It provides doctors and researchers with literature that manifests the psyche and the mind of AD and MCI patients by studying their narratives from a cognitive linguistic point of view.