Telegraphic style utterances in nonfluent aphasias: a functional-discursive study

Author(s)

Arnaldo Rodrigues de Lima

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2023-04-10

Examining board members

Rosana do Carmo Novaes Pinto; Maria Irma Hadler Coudry; Larissa Picinato Mazuchelli; André Vinícius Lopes Coneglian; Roberto Gomes Camacho

• Advisor: Rosana do Carmo Novaes Pinto

Abstract

One of the main rationales for Linguistics to focus on pathologies and, foremost, on different types of aphasia is that the data elicited from this field may be convoked either to corroborate or to refute hypotheses about language functioning in so-called ‘normality’. Therewith, it can contribute to the development of linguistic theories. ‘Agrammatism’ is among the most studied phenomena within the scope of Neurolinguistics. Its main symptom is the production of ‘telegraphic speech’, which is resignified in this Dissertation as ‘telegraphic style utterances’. This production is characterized by the absence and/or substitution of function words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns – among others) and, also, by the instability with bound (inflectional and derivational) morphemes during the process of utterance production. On this phenomenon, one of the aspects that leads most scholars to diverge is bounded up with the heterogeneity in the co-occurrence of symptoms among the cases (that is, interindividual variation) and within the linguistic production of the same person (that is, intraindividual variation). This dissertation stems from a qualitative and interdisciplinary study, which articulate the principles of the Discursive Neurolinguistics, the Functional Discourse Grammar and the Philosophy of Language developed by Bakhtin’s Circle. The main objective of this work is to better account for the nature of [inter/intra]individual variations in the telegraphic style utterances produced by people with nonfluent aphasia. The set of data, which makes up the corpus of the present research, was retrieved from the Database of the ‘Group of Linguistic Studies on Aging and Pathologies’. The corpus reports to elicited data, which have emerged during interactions with four nonfluent individuals – Mrs. Olívia, Letícia, Victor and Pedro (all of them are referred to by means of pseudonyms) who have participated in the activities developed at the ‘Co-living Center for People with Aphasia’, located at the Institute of Language Studies from State University of Campinas – São Paulo, Brazil. All the dialogic episodes are discursively transcribed and the analysis is guided by the principles of the microgenetic paradigm, which seeks to bring to light the main aspects related to [inter/intra]individual variations, throughout a longitudinal follow-up accompaniment. To this end, the analysis about these variations will take into consideration aspects that range from the cerebral injured areas – which influence the production of nonfluent aphasias –, those more subjective features, such as the relationship that people establishes with their aphasia, the different factors that make up the process of utterance production, the mutual and shared contextual knowledge among the speakers, the influence of socio-historical features – such as literacy, formal education –, and the like. Non-verbal alternative means of communication are centrally considered in order to analyze and lay bare the significations strategies which people with aphasia perform during the dialogical processes of interaction. Aiming to corroborate the hypothesis that the set of signs and symptoms, which occur in the aphasic speech, is not intertwined (that is, directly related) to losses in the grammatical knowledge due to impacts within specific sub-components of language system, the language alterations will be analyzed against theoretical and epistemological musings on the relationship between thought and language, developed both within the Modern Linguistics and Soviet Neuropsychology paradigms, in which is to be considered the utmost theoretic-methodological consequence of the articulation between Discursive Neurolinguistics and Functional Discourse Grammar (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 17/26777-2 - A neurolinguistic study on telegraphic style utterances in Aphasia: the challenge of understanding inter- and intra-case variations
• Grantee: Arnaldo Rodrigues de Lima
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate