Interacting with difficulty

Following brain damage after stroke, a language disorder known as aphasia can significantly interfere with conversational flow due to both the individual’s difficulties with word-finding and grammar, as well as their conversational partner’s ability to deal with such difficulties. This chapter explores the kinds of analyses used to date to illuminate the nature of interactions involving people with aphasia and their conversational partners, and the difficulties they encounter. In particular, Conversation Analysis (1977) and Systemic Functional Linguistics approaches (Halliday 1994) are discussed, and the challenges involved in applying such frameworks to clinical populations are examined.