Formulating Actions and Events With Limited Linguistic Resources: Enactment and Iconicity in Agrammatic Aphasic Talk

Abstract

In this article a conversation analytic approach is used to investigate the form and use of enactment by speakers with agrammatic aphasia in talk-in-interaction. Enactment here refers to the employment by participants of direct reported speech and/or other behavior such as the use of gesture/body movement and/or prosody to iconically depict some aspects of reported scenes or events. The enactment of these speakers is notable in terms of the distinctive grammatical practices within which it is regularly produced (e.g., without any reporting verb such as say) and a reliance on kinesic enactment and simple lexical forms produced as seconds, i.e., reactions or second pair-part responses such as oh, no, and oh no. It is argued that enactment and other instances of iconicity within interaction as produced by these aphasic speakers are examples of interactional methods adopted by them in order to formulate actions and events in talk using the limited lexical and grammatical resources at their disposal, and some similarities to other types of language use such as child language and pidgins are noted.

This research was funded by an award from the Economic and Social Research Council (Award R000222754). Earlier versions of the article were presented at the International Pragmatics Association Conference, Budapest (2000); the Euresco Conference on the Linguistic Organisation of Conversational Activities, Helsinki (2002); the University of Reading seminar series (2003), and the British Aphasiology Conference, Newcastle University (2003). We are grateful to all who have given feedback on the work presented here.

Notes

¹ The economical nature of the formulation here can be seen if other possible methods of constructing the utterance are envisaged. An indirect reported speech version, for example, might take the form “I'm going to phone up that paper supplier and ask where my paper's got to.” Notable advantages for agrammatic speakers such as Connie of the direct enacted version in Extract 1 over the possible alternative indirect one are that as well as being shorter, lexically simpler, and allowing the aphasic speaker to use his/her relatively intact kinesic and prosodic/paralinguistic resources, the formulation in Extract 1 avoids the need for the production of a reporting verb (ask) and the subordination construction that follows it.

² The source of this problem for Jane in understanding whether Connie is enacting a past or future event appears to lie in the fact that Connie uses the present tense both in the enactment (the contracted form of is) and in the preceding “I phone up.” Another example from the same conversation of Jane misinterpreting something Connie says as a past event when it is a future event is discussed in Beeke et al. (2003). Patterns of such examples point to one way in which specific aphasic impairments, such as difficulties with morphology, can lead to real interactional problems for aphasic speakers and their conversation partners.

³ This extract thus provides an example of how, in light of limitations in the ability to use verbal symbols, aphasic speakers may make increased and distinctive use of the other two types of sign described by Peirce, indexes (i.e., Roy indicating by pointing in line 10) and icons (i.e., Roy's demonstrating an action by means of kinesic enactment in line 12). Another example of the combination of indicating and demonstrating is given in Clark and Gerrig (1990, example 3), although in Extract 2 here it is notable that Roy is not pointing to an actual person or object but rather manages to indicate a person through having set up this slot for a person reference by means of the prior person reference to Linda and the point that accompanied that reference. In part, therefore, the second point gets its ability to communicate a particular meaning by means of the semiotic space set up by the first point rather than by indicating a particular person or object in the physical environment. The regular use of verbal indexical resources in the construction of turns by fluent aphasic speakers has been described by Wilkinson et al. (2003).

⁴ For evidence that this is the interpretation of the participants see lines 13 to 22. In particular, with her unpacking of Roy's mime in line 13 (“we're all going ↑oooooh!”), Di can be seen to treat the mime as the reported speakers reacting to something.

⁵ Unlike in examples 1 to 3 Connie here maintains eye contact with her recipient while producing her enactment. The removal of eye contact during enactment is a common feature of these extracts (see also Lind [2002] and Sidnell [2006]).

⁶ The held gesture here appears to be a gesturally iconic method of informing the recipient of the ongoing nature of the action during the reported events.

⁷ It is notable that while Roy here is able to convey an action and event by a more conventional method and without using enactment (i.e., by using a verb as part of the subject–verb construction “house collapsed”), the verb “collapsed” is only produced after a 5.2-s delay after “house,” during which time Roy displays a search for the word in the form of search tokens such as “eh.” One effect of this attempt to use a more conventional method for formulating an action/event, therefore, is the occurrence of repair, here in the form of a word search (Schegloff et al., 1977), which delays the progressivity of the word-by-word production of the utterance (see Lerner, 1996). This ability of Roy's to be able to produce certain verbs within grammatical constructions but only after a significant delay is also seen in his performance within clinical tests. For example, in a picture-description task where he has been asked to describe a picture of a girl kicking a snake he says “um right (1.7) girl, (3.4) girl (11.6) kick, (1.7) snake” (see Beeke [2005] where a detailed comparison is provided of Roy's performance in conversation and in clinical tests).

⁸ As can be seen from the previous examples, many of the forms of enactment, such as no or oh are used by more than one of the aphasic speakers analyzed here, although Roy is the only aphasic speaker here to use each of the four forms discussed.

⁹ The use of gesture as a resource for people with aphasia within interaction has been explored by a number of researchers including C. Goodwin (for example, C. Goodwin 2003, 2006), Klippi (1996), and Lind (2002). One distinctive feature of the gestures and other kinesic behavior observable in the present article is the way in which they can regularly be seen to be creatively combined with verbal/vocal behavior, particularly in the form of multimodal enactments, to produce quite complex meaning (as seen, for instance, in Extract 9).

¹⁰ As such, these aphasic examples provide complementary evidence to that of, for example, Clark and Gerrig (1990) and Mayes (1990), who suggest that enactment/direct reported speech be viewed as “constructed dialogue” (Tannen, 1989) rather than as a true rendition of what and how something was actually said in the reported situation.

¹¹ While the adaptations discussed here relate to nonfluent, agrammatic speakers, a similar argument is used by Wilkinson et al. (2003) in relation to fluent aphasic speakers, i.e., that although on occasion they can be seen to produce utterances using the conventional linguistic methods they would have done before the onset of aphasia, such methods regularly result in repair and delays in progressivity. An advantage of the unconventional methods they can be seen to use for turn construction include the fact that these methods minimize repair and delays in progressivity.

¹² See Heeschen and Schegloff (1999) for another way in which the recipient works to unpack the meaning of the agrammatic speaker's turn.

¹³ Laughter is a simple response in that, while displaying an understanding of a prior turn as joke or nonserious, it does not involve the more complex forms of understanding displays that are typically relevant after a serious utterance (Sacks, 1972, 1992). It is notable, for example, that in this case the laughter later gets replaced as a response by an other-initiation of repair when the aphasic speaker later redoes the enactment (Extract 6b, lines 25–32).

¹⁴ One set of empirical studies making use of Givón's (1979) work to explore aphasia is that of Schnitzer (1989, 1995). Shnitzer argues that aphasic speakers' performance on a test battery (described in Schnitzer, 1989) presents evidence that these speakers have reverted to the pragmatic mode of communication as described in Givón (1979). In his work on “pre-grammatical communication” Givón himself has presented empirical data highlighting the similarities between agrammatic aphasia, early child communication, and speakers using a second language (Givón, 2005). Similarities between agrammatic aphasia and, for example, child language have also been noted in empirical studies that do not use a Givónian framework (see, for instance, Kolk [2001]).