ABSTRACT
One manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive and apparently irreversible deterioration of the patient’s ability to communicate with others. Researchers generally agree that an Alzheimer’s patient’s problems in communication are due less to phonological and morphosyntactic disorders than to difficulties on the semantic and pragmatic levels (Appell, Kertesz, & Fisman, 1982; Bayles, 1979; Bayles & Kaszniak, 1987; Hier, Hagenlocker, & Shindler, 1985; Kempler, 1984; Obler, 1981; Schwartz, Marin, & Saffran, 1979). Because of their basically well-formed syntactic structure, most of the inappropriate or irrelevant utterances characteristic of the language used by Alzheimer’s patients would not appear out of the ordinary in isolation (with the exception of neologisms), but only when heard within the larger discourse context in pursuit of some interactional goal. In line 3 of Example 1, the utterances “You can do that. That’s a good idea,” which are produced by an Alzheimer’s patient, are perfectly well-formed syntactically but become marked in the larger discourse. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203773352/9d429632-b423-442d-91cf-5e06e8891ffc/content/fig11_u1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
