Prefiero escuchar en mi interior y ver qué me pide el cuerpo: verbos de proceso mental y narrativas de (auto)descubrimiento en diarios de escalada

This paper offers a semantic analysis of the use of mental verbs in rock climbing diaries, with a view to showing how different lexical semantic realizations of mental verbs in these texts give rise to specific types of narratives. At the methodological level, the paper proposes a procedure for corpus-based analysis of verb argument structure as a valuable starting point for narrative analysis. In order to highlight the lexical-semantic texture of the discursive frames that give rise to discovery narratives (e.g., Douglas y Carless 2015, Arijs et al. 2017), a methodology is devised that combines quantitative (corpus-based) and qualitative observations in order to show the incidence, distribution and semantic make-up of different types of mental verbs expressing cognition and affectivity processes (Halliday 1985/1994, Levin 1998, Morley 2000, Vanhoe 2004). The method is applied to the analysis of a 167,217 token corpus. The lexical-semantic evidence emerged from the analysis suggests the predominance of discovery narratives with a strong emphasis on self-knowledge (Arijs et al. 2017, Cajina-Guedeat and Reyes-Bossio 2021) and on the relationship between humans and nature (Arijs et al. 2017, Nitzke 2020). Cognition verbs are used to give prominence to the decision-making processes dictated by climbers’ psychological states and external conditions, which contributes to characterizing rock climbing as a physical activity with an important mental component. Verbs of affectivity are often used to represent the love for the sport, the mountains and nature as a strong motivational drive. When inanimate natural elements or animals are given the thematic role of experiencer or theme, the resulting anthropomorphic representation of the environment expresses an almost empathetic symbiosis between humans and nature, where the latter is portrayed as deserving of respect and love.