Clinical discourse analysis: One theory or many?

Abstract

The trend within speech pathology to focus on language in use raises many complex theoretical questions. This article reviews the evolution of this trend with reference to pragmatics and discourse and surveys the theoretical models that have been applied to their study. This survey prompts the question of what the theoretical needs of discourse modelling in speech pathology practice are and how best they might be addressed. The view that functional approaches require a combination of theoretical perspectives is questioned, and the model of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is suggested as a unitary model, which offers an alternative to theoretical eclecticism.