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Pictures without frames: Lexical bundles and multiword expressions in Dementia discourse
13th World Congress on Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease
September 16-17, 2019 | Paris, France
Boyd H Davis and Margaret Maclagan
UNC-Charlotte, USA University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Posters & Accepted Abstracts : J Clin Psychiatry Cog Psychol
Abstract:
‘Do you know what happened on the way to work today?’
‘Have you heard the latest about Peter?’ When we want
to introduce a story into a conversation, we usually
introduce it with a frame. This alerts the listener that the
speaker wishes to tell a story and indicates either that
it is a totally new topic or that it is relevant to what has
gone before. As Alzheimer’s Disease progresses, speakers
can find it increasingly difficult to use appropriate frames
to introduce their stories. Instead they often launch into
stories that seemingly bear no relation to what their
conversation partner has said.
In this presentation we will examine 20 conversations
between “Maureen Littlejohn” and two different types of
conversation partners over 6 years: the first author and 17
undergraduate students. All conversation partners (CP) had
the same brief: to engage Ms. Littlejohn in conversation.
No topics or time limits were specified and the CP varied
in their skill in eliciting conversation. Initially, Ms. Littlejohn
could tie her stories into questions asked by her CP. In her
last conversation with the first author, who was close to
her in age, Ms. Littlejohn was still able to hold a ‘normal’
conversation, telling stories appropriately. However, her
conversations with the students were different. Whereas
she treated the first author as a friend (even though she
could not remember her name), she felt she needed to
entertain the students. She did this by telling and repeating
‘performance’stories and phrases without any apparent
link to the previous conversational content and without
any introductory frame. We explore how the phrasing and
the relevance of Ms. Littlejohn’s stories changed across the
6 years of recorded conversations.
Biography:
Boyd H Davis (UNC-Charlotte, USA) and Margaret Maclagan (retired, University of Canterbury, NZ) are linguists who have been collaborating and publishing research on discourse in dementia for the last twenty years. Their most recent articles appear in Journal of Pragmatics.
E-mail: bdavis@uncc.edu margaret.maclagan@canterbury.ac.nz
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