Discourse Analysis and Applications

Studies in Adult Clinical Populations

Ronald L. Bloom, Loraine K. Obler

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134778898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Application of analytic discourse techniques to clinical practice is relatively recent. This book's contributors begin with the notion that systematic examination of discourse provides a rich source of data for describing the complex relationships among language, social context, and the cognitive processes that underlie discourse comprehension and production. Evidence is provided that when discourse is studied across different clinical populations, analysis yields an optimal opportunity for developing dynamic models of brain and language that more thoroughly account for the complexity of language use in social contexts. Accordingly, studies presented in this volume have a dual focus -- to examine the implications of discourse research on neurolinguistic theories and to evaluate the contribution of discourse analysis to understanding the clinical status of patients with brain damage. As such, this volume reports patterns of preserved and impaired discourse behavior in normal adults and in different adult clinical populations. It also describes numerous tasks designed to elicit a variety of discourse genres and a host of techniques created to describe how subjects order information and relate ideas across sentences. In addition, it includes numerous abstract units and linguistic devices targeted to examine those aspects of discourse that govern cohesion, organization, and topic manipulation. This volume is unique because it presents both theoretical and clinical papers that examine a variety of communication pathologies. Clinicians often report dissatisfaction with formal test batteries in that results are often at variance with clinical observation of performance in real life situations. To address this concern, this work proposes methods for examining discourse that move the examiner closer to naturalistic sampling. The research presented demonstrates that discourse analysis provides clinically significant information that contributes to the understanding of the cognitive, linguistic, and social status of people with communication disorders. These studies also offer a framework to support continuously evolving diagnostic and treatment paradigms for adults with neurological communication pathologies.

Chapter 1

Approaches to the Study of Discourse in the Social Sciences

Judith Duchan

State University of New York at Buffalo

Even though studies of discourse began in ancient times (e.g., Aristotle’s Poetics), they have only recently come to the fore in the social sciences. Discourse studies are now becoming commonplace in anthropology (e.g., Clifford, 1988), history (e.g., White, 1981), sociology (e.g., Drew & Heritage, 1992), linguistics (e.g., Chafe, 1980; Halliday & Hasan, 1976), computer science (e.g., Frederiksen, Bracewell, Breuleux, & Renauld, 1990), psychology (e.g., van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), education (Cazden, 1988), and neurolinguistics (Joanette & Brownell, 1990, as well as this volume). The stunning growth in the number of researchers studying discourse and in the number of studies published in the area is evidenced by the emergence in the social sciences of new journals (e.g., Discourse Processes, Journal of Narrative and Life History, Text), conferences on the topic, and books such as this dedicated solely to aspects of discourse.

The emphases of these relatively new research efforts differ from one another, depending on the discipline and the specific philosophy and goals of the researchers carrying them out. However varied, the studies together have the potential of dramatically changing what went before. Their effect on former thinking in the disciplines has yet to be realized. Some foresee a paradigm shift that will shake disciplinary grounds and require new looks at old truths (Gee, 1992). Others treat the new studies as a natural outgrowth of previous work following the natural progressions in their home discipline (Bloom, chapter 5, this volume; Halliday & Hasan, 1976).

The authors of the studies in this volume follow their sciences’ natural progression in that they have used analyses that are logical extensions of what has been done before. The authors provide us with a coherent and specific approach to the study of discourse using well worked out methods to investigate new phenomena. That approach is linguistic in that it treats discourse as consisting of language constituents. Discourse is seen as ways in which sentences are combined to form meaningful wholes. The analyses in the studies are structural because they are aimed at uncovering the underlying structures around which the elements of the discourse corpus is organized. The studies are comparative in that the organizational structure of discourse produced by adults with disabilities is compared with that produced by adults without disabilities.

Although the studies all fall within the philosophy and methodology of a linguistic structuralist tradition, they differ considerably from one another in what they study and how they carry out their analyses. Studies are of different discourse genres, for example, with some examining their subjects’ picture descriptions, others using storytelling and recall, and still others using instructional discourse. The elements studied within the genres also differ for the different research projects. Some researchers study small, micro-, or nearby relations between elements in the text such as local level cohesion devices (Coelho, Liles, & Duffy, chapter 6, this volume; and DeSanti, Koenig, Obler, & Goldberger, chapter 12, this volume); others focus on structures that affect more of the discourse—global or macrostructures such as themes, episodes, or morals (Coelho et al., chapter 6, this volume; Ulatowska, Chapman, & Johnson, chapter 3, this volume).

The studies in this book fit neatly with what is currently going on in the social sciences in the area of discourse studies. In this chapter I review and characterize the various ways researchers in the social sciences have been studying discourse in recent years in an effort to show the historical roots of the approaches taken by those in this book and to place the work in its context. I then present an overview of the literature on linguistic analyses of discourse. Finally, I suggest some future directions for research of this type, so as to be in keeping with this book’s spirit of adventure and with its aim to pave new ways for studying those with communicative disorders.

APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE

The Thought Behind the Discourse. A strong impetus for studying discourse has been from the developments in “schema theory” in psychology and computer science (Mandler, 1984; Schank & Abelson, 1977). The theory holds that discourse is created, understood, and remembered in accordance with complex mental representations or conceptual schemas. (See Bartlett, 1932, for an earlier and well-developed rendition of this view as it applies to memory.) For example, a story that is structured like a fable will have a setting, a middle episode or episodes, and an ending. To know and expect this structure when dealing with a new or a familiar story is to have a schema about the structure of stories of this type (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975; Stein & Glenn, 1979). Individuals who know the abstract structure of such stories use that knowledge whenever dealing with a particular story having such a format. Examples of schemata that have been hypothesized as structures underlying different types of discourse are event scripts used in creating and understanding event descriptions (Nelson, 1986), story grammars used in interpreting and recalling simple stories (Roth & Spekman, chapter 8, this volume; Stein & Glenn, 1979), and exchange structures governing the turn-taking etiquette of parties engaged in a classroom lesson, for example (Mehan, 1979).

The Creative Translation of Thought Into Language. The researchers who study the conceptual or schematic underpinnings of discourse have been critiqued for paying insufficient attention to how the schemas get translated into language. Bamberg (1991, p. 158), for example, criticized those who seem to be treating discourse as a direct mapping of language onto conceptual structures. He advocated a more complex view that regards the relationship between thoughts and their telling as being a highly creative one. Under the mapping view, stories should have the same time structure and subjective perspective as the experience being told about. The creative view presumes that the verbal expression of an experience involves many choices and is likely to differ from the original experience not only in its temporality but also in the personal point of view. Tellers, in order to make their tale more suspenseful and understandable, can highlight certain aspects of the event, alter temporal sequences, and shift perspectives to portray the feelings of other participants. Those with well-developed discourse competence will be able to choose a level of detail within which to cast their ideas. They can report what happened in outline form, as did the annalists of medieval times who listed events that occurred without ascribing motivation or a connection between them (White, 1981); they can create a more detailed depiction including motivation and connectivity to entertain an audience (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982), or they can provide excruciating detail such as that needed when producing descriptions as evidence in courtroom proceedings (Barry, 1991).

Discourse as Interpreted Text. Compatible with the creative view of discourse is the open text view that sees the language of the discourse as a skeletal rendition of its intended interpretation. A painted scene, even one that is a realistic version of the original scene, is only suggestive of the original. The painter as well as the viewer knows more about the painting than is shown directly: They must provide a third dimension to a two-dimensional surface, they must ascribe emotional content using the choice of colors and shapes, and they must relate the lines to the imagined scene in order to interpret them as horizons, trees, or mountains. Finally, they may want to evaluate the effort as a work of art, drawing on their previous experiences with the particular genre and knowledge of the work of other artists engaged in it. Similarly, someone describing a scene is also forced to create a skeletal version of the real or imagined scene, relying on the interpreter to read between the lines in order to arrive at the coherent and elaborated picture.

Not all discourse analysts subscribe to the open text view. Instead, they adopt a more closed text view and, for example, focus on the language of the text rather than on how authors and recipients interpret the text. Halliday and Hasan (1976) took a closed view of textual cohesion when they depicted textual elements as related, rather than regarding the interpreter of the text as the one who infers the relationship. In a closed text view anaphoric pronouns are described as getting their meaning through ties to earlier referring expressions in the text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Liles, 1985), rather than as being interpreted in accordance with focused elements in a mental representation.

Voice and Value Orientation as Expressed in Discourse. Various authors have studied emotionally laden aspects of discourse, or what Bamberg (1991) called the “value orientations” in the discourse. He included in this approach researchers who have studied the type and use of evaluative comments in narratives (e.g., Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991; Labov & Waletsky, 1967; Reilly, 1992) as well as those who have studied the “voice” in which a segment of discourse is expressed (Bakhtin, 1985; Bamberg, 1991; Budwig, 1991, cited in Bamberg, 1991). Also within the value orientation approaches is the research that analyzes discourse describing emotionally laden experiences (Haviland & Goldston, in press; Hudson, Gebelt, Haviland, & Bentivenga, 1992). Finally, there are studies that compare discourse and communicative competence for discourse contexts that require emotionally laden expressions with those that do not (R. Bloom, Borod, Obler, & Gerstman, 1992; Hudson et al., 1992).

The Influences of Audience on an Author’s Discourse Structuring. A number of research projects have investigated ways discourse is designed to fit the intended audience. Linguistic devices have been identified that signal a listener or reader about how to understand the narratives. Intensity markers such as “really” tell the audience what is important (Labov, 1984); words and phrases such as “so,” “then,” “anyway,” “by the way” can be used to mark degree of continuity or discontinuity in the discourse (Duchan, Waltzman, & Meth, 1992; Schiffrin, 1987; Young, 1987), and syntactic and morphological and vocal indicators of subordination can be used to distinguish foreground from background information (Hopper, 1979). Authors as young as 4 years have been found to structure their discourse differently depending on whether their audience is presumed to be knowledgable or naive about the subject matter (Shatz & Gelman, 1973).

Discourse Expressions of Authority and Power. Discourse analyses have also been aimed at discovering the power relationships expressed between the writer or speaker and the audience. Noteworthy contributors to this approach are ethnographers whose own research reports have been the object of their discourse analyses. The conclusion from their analyses has been that the researchers typically take an authoritarian stance casting their subjects as subordinate “others” (Clifford, 1983; Geertz, 1988; Young, 1991).

Other researchers have examined the discourse for evidence of power relations between the subjects they are studying (e.g., Bedrosian & Prutting, 1978; Domingo, chapter 7, this volume). These authors have analyzed conversational bids, such as direct and indirect requests, as manifestations of underlying dominance relations among participants. They found a difference in requesting between dominant and submissive partners and that these expressions of dominance and submission differed with different contexts.

Discourse as Interaction. The emphases just described have had their focus on the author and textual contributions to the discourse structuring. There is also a healthy research literature that sees discourse as a two- or multiparty endeavor. Some studies show the influence of listeners’ actions to the speakers’ subsequent discourse production (e.g., Goodwin, 1981). Others, such as those who adopt the tenets of postmodernism, take the perspective of the audience as their point of departure, examining the readers’ interpretation of texts (Rosenau, 1992). Still others examine the reciprocal contribution of both partners in the creation of a segment of discourse (Higginbotham, 1989).

The Functions of Discourse. Discourse has been subdivided into different genres based on the different functions served. Bruner (1986) took a global look at discourse function, looking at the functional differences in discourse genres. He viewed “argument” and “narrative” as having different functions in that “arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness” (p. 11). Conversational analysts study ways partners negotiate turn-taking during their conversational interactions. They also study in detail more circumscribed functions carried out sporadically such as that involved in the repairing of conversational breakdowns (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977), issuing invitations (Drew, 1984), and delivering bad news during clinical interactions (Maynard, 1992). Finally, discourse functions have been found to be sensitive to cultural difference and thus to create difficulty in contexts of cultural mismatches (Heath, 1983; Michaels, 1981).

Discourse of Situations. Some researchers have confined their stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Approaches to the Study of Discourse in the Social Sciences
• Chapter 2 Intersubject Variability in Adult Normal Discourse
• Chapter 3 Discourse Macrostructure in Aphasia
• Chapter 4 A Method for Microanalysis of Discourse in Brain-Damaged Patients
• Chapter 5 Hemispheric Responsibility and Discourse Production: Contrasting Patients With Unilateral Left and Right Hemisphere Damage
• Chapter 6 Cognitive Framework: A Description of Discourse Abilities in Traumatically Brain-Injured Adults
• Chapter 7 The Expression of Pragmatic Intentions in Adults With Mental Retardation During Instructional Discourse
• Chapter 8 Oral Story Production in Adults With Learning Disabilities
• Chapter 9 Studies of Discourse Production in Adults With Alzheimer’s Disease
• Chapter 10 Conversational Topic-Shifting Analysis in Dementia
• Chapter 11 Requests for Clarification as Evidence of Pragmatic Comprehension Difficulty: The Case of Alzheimer’s Disease
• Chapter 12 Cohesive Devices and Conversational Discourse in Alzheimer’s Disease
• Chapter 13 Communication Patterns in End-Stage Alzheimer’s Disease: Pragmatic Analyses
• Author Index
• Subject Index