Abstract
Research on “schizophrenic speech” has given significant attention to cataloguing impairments in cohesion and coherence. While much of this research has traditionally relied on well-defined laboratory tasks that elicit monologic speech samples to identify linguistic errors, recent work has called for researchers to examine situated and meaningful language use to consider impairments at the discourse level. The implication is that capturing what is impaired requires a more discursive lens than has previously been applied. Presenting a case study of a single speaker and his use of the cohesive marker like I say to tie back to previous talk, this chapter considers some of the theoretical and methodological challenges faced in examining the discourse of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia (IwS). Examining 56 cases of like I say employed across only four hours of video recorded interactions, I show that, although like I say was notably frequent, it enabled its speaker to achieve a range of social actions and to navigate challenging interactional sequences, such as sustaining small talk with an unfamiliar and unforthcoming interlocutor. The chapter makes a case not only for examining linguistic structures in situated interaction to consider what is marked, or atypical, but also for considering how such atypicality may be effectively functional for IwS in naturally occurring interactions. This chapter thus cautions against presuming that an atypical discourse practice—one that may verge from normative standards whether in frequency and/or use—is necessarily an impaired one.
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Notes
- 1.
A total of 66 cases of LIS were identified in the data. However, four of these cases did not have a first mention that could be identified from the data, which may have been because the first mentions were produced off camera or because they were not produced at all. Three cases were abandoned in mid-production.
- 2.
Although speculative, this turn may have been on its way to “And it’s kind of confusing.” In this case, Kevin’s repair would been produced specifically to insert “you know like I say,” suggesting the interactional importance for making the explicit reference to the first mention in line 4.
- 3.
In that sense, his stepwise topical transitions noted above, while not used to exit the same kind of troubles telling contexts that Jefferson (1984) originally described, may work to exit a different sort of trouble—a sequence of small talk with an unfamiliar interlocutor who is minimally responsive.
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Mikesell, L. (2020). Does Atypicality Entail Impairment? Tracing the Use of a Cohesive Marker in the Interactions of an Individual with Schizophrenia. In: Wilkinson, R., Rae, J.P., Rasmussen, G. (eds) Atypical Interaction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28799-3_5
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