Article published in:
The Conversation Frame: Forms and functions of fictive interaction
Edited by Esther Pascual and Sergeiy Sandler
[Human Cognitive Processing 55] 2016
► pp. 323–342

The use of interactive structures as communicative strategy in Dutch and Portuguese aphasic speakers

| VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
| Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil

This is a comparative study involving conversational data from Brazilian Portuguese and Netherlands Dutch speakers with agrammatic aphasia, a linguistic impairment after acquired brain damage. These speakers typically communicate through reduced syntactic structures. We found the four participants in our study to creatively manipulate their elliptical repertoire to exploit shared interactive knowledge. They used non-quotative direct speech for expressing mental and emotional states and states of affairs, as well as narrative events and grammatical concepts. Both the Dutch and Brazilian participants typically combined fictive direct speech with the topic-comment structure, sometimes expressed as a fictive question-answer pair. We argue that this particular use of elliptical repertoire represents a communicative strategy to manage interactive requirements when facing linguistic limitations.

Keywords: agrammatism, conditionality, direct speech, fictive interaction, fictive question-answer pairs, topic-comment structure
Published online: 01 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.55.16ver
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