Subalternidad y contrahegemonía en la narrativa testimonial kichwa de la sierra norte del Ecuador

Testimonial narratives are a discursive gender of subaltern subjects who exert through it their right to express their own voices and represent themselves in parallel to dominant discourses. Testimonial narratives construct their elements on the basis of particular linguistic mechanisms. A previous study of the narrative elements of testimonio with tools of traditional analysis left aside the mechanism of selfrepresentation of the narrative subject and that of representation of social actors in discourse. This paper intends to study identities as they are constructed and projected onto testimonial narratives with the use of tools provided by Critical Discourse Analysis. It deals with the strategic use of specific linguistic elements in a representative corpus of testimonial narratives about the life in haciendas, which were collected in several communities in the parish of San Pablo del Lago in the northern Ecuadorian Highlands. Four are the linguistic elements under analysis:
pronouns as the privileged linguistic representation of subjects; direct speech acts as conspicuous forms of dialogicity and intertextuality; figurative comparisons as a mirror of speakers’ worldviews; and evaluations as aesthetic elements of discourse.