Evidence of blame-solving in victims’ discourse

understanding mental spaces through implicit argumentation

Abstract

This article investigates evidence of victim-blaming in victim discourse, employing Fauconnier's (1994) Theory of Mental Spaces as a theoretical-methodological approach, and articulating it with the notion of implicit argumentation. The Theory of Mental Spaces allows us to map how base spaces and evoked spaces connect and influence the production of meaning. Methodologically, the analysis evaluates linguistic and semantic indicators that reveal orientations attributed to the victim, negotiations of agency, and narrative strategies that can function as evidence of victim-blaming. The article will analyze how the activation of mental spaces and linguistic organization in the discourse of victims of violence contribute to the construction of evaluative meanings, highlighting processes of implicit argumentation that favor interpretations of victim-blaming. The corpus consists of discursive excerpts extracted from publicly accessible (online) material, which compiles accounts from women victims of violence. The results indicate that the activated mental spaces and linguistic choices of the victims reveal discursive-cognitive dynamics that organize the construction of interpretative scenarios of violence. In these scenarios, the victim is frequently configured as an evaluable agent, since the mappings between mental spaces reorder roles of agency and responsibility, allowing actions, reactions, and emotional states to be interpreted as explanatory factors of the violence.