ABSTRACT
If ever there were a need to justify the pragmatic study of language, then understanding the many communication impairments that result when pragmatics is disordered would be such a justification. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists 1 estimates that approximately 2.5 million people in the UK have a communication problem of some kind. For a significant number of these people, disorders at the pragmatic level of language constitute a considerable and frustrating barrier to effective communication. In this chapter, we examine a range of child and adult language disorders in which pragmatic processes are disrupted or in which pragmatic knowledge has never been normally acquired. Many of these disorders are the direct result of medical events and conditions – for example, aphasia in an adult who sustains a CVA. 2 However, in a number of other disorders an underlying medical cause is less certain – semantic-pragmatic disorder in children, for example. In certain disorders, pragmatics is affected along with structural levels of language (phonology, syntax and semantics). In other disorders, pragmatics is the primary linguistic deficit. Also, in some of these language disorders the comprehension of pragmatic aspects of language is impaired (receptive pragmatics). In other disorders, the impairment involves an inability to observe pragmatic principles and maxims during the production of language (expressive pragmatics). As well as examining pragmatic disorders along each of the aforementioned parameters, we discuss how theoretical frameworks in pragmatics – for example, relevance theory – have come to inform aspects of clinical linguistic practice. Finally, in the spirit of multidisciplinary enquiry that is the hallmark of this text, we examine what we can learn about linguistic pragmatics in general from the study of disordered pragmatics.
