ABSTRACT
In our last chapter we were able to review the substantial progress which has been made in applying psycholinguistics to intervention in aphasia, illustrating our review with over 30 published cases where progress had been evaluated. The situation is very different for pragmatics. Although 'functional communication' has long been the acknowledged target of much aphasia therapy, we can cite very few evaluative studies. Even the informed assessment of patients' pragmatic abilities lags far behind psycholinguistic assessment, and some of the procedures in current clinical use are based on questionable postulates. We therefore cannot present the same kind of review as we did in Chapters 10 and 11. Instead we begin this chapter with an account of the present clinical perspective on applying pragmatics in intervention in aphasia, and end it with ideas on how the review of pragmatics we have given in Chapters 6 to 9 suggests that this clinical pragmatic approach might be adjusted and extended.
