Donna Williams’ Nobody nowhere and Somebody somewhere: A corpus based discourse analysis of the author’s language as a tool to negotiate one’s relationship with the world and the self

Focusing on issues of identity, diversity, disability, labelling and shame, this paper analyses language as a tool to negotiate one’s identity and relationship with the self and the world. The paper examines two international bestsellers by Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere (Williams, 1992) and Somebody Somewhere (Williams, 1994), about her life before and after being officially diagnosed with autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder implying difficulties in communication and interaction (APA, 2013). Williams’ social media presence has also been explored through her personal website (Williams, n.d.), where mature contributions about her life, work, and diagnoses can be found, and her presence on a social activism website (auties.org). Relying on a Corpus Based Discourse Analysis methodology, Williams’s language (Waltz, 2005) and the use and distribution of collocates and metaphors in it (Broderick Ne’eman, 2008) have been investigated to understand their role in the negotiation of her identity with ‘the world’ and with herself, as a person deemed as ‘mad’ first, and autistic later. The analysis revealed that writing enabled Williams to understand her own nature, and that her linguistic choices mirror her thoughts and feelings, which are also expressed through metaphors, despite issues with language, pragmatics, and metaphorical language being commonly associated with autism.