Collaborative role construction in a conversation with dementia: An application of systemic functional linguistics

Abstract

This study applies the tools provided by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to the description of patterns in a conversation between a person with dementia and a person without. It shows how, in the presence of, on the one hand, considerable communicative and cognitive deficits, and on the other, a collaborative interlocutor, a person with dementia succeeds in leading and sustaining a lengthy conversation, and of constructing for himself a positive role in the interaction, namely that of the elder advising a much younger man.

• Dementia of the Alzheimer's type
• conversation
• Systemic Functional Linguistics

Notes

1. Owing to space limitations, this study does not reproduce many excerpts from the conversation. It was originally recorded by the second author of this paper, and transcribed by the first author. A full transcript is published in Guendouzi and Müller (2006: 241–258). For the purposes of this analysis, the transcript was adapted for use with SALT (Miller & Chapman, 2004).

2. ‘Utterance’ is here defined as a C‐unit or elliptical C‐unit (see Miller & Chapman, 2004), rather than a conversational turn. Incomplete C‐units were also counted as utterances if they made up a complete conversational turn.

3. One cannot make a judgement as to whether one is dealing with a language comprehension difficulty, or one of hearing acuity (there had been no recent hearing test, but Mr M appeared at times to have difficulties with his hearing, especially in noisy surroundings). However, of course, either will have an impact on communicative quality of life.