ABSTRACT
In recent years, there have been steady advances in the neurology, neurophysiology, and neuropathology of dementing diseases and in experimental studies probing their communicative and cognitive consequences. There is also a growing body of work, in dementias and other neurogenic communicative disorders (such as aphasia following focal brain injury or traumatic brain injury), that uses qualitative methods to analyze naturally occurring interactions between persons with a communicative disorder and persons without. The focus of our own work, and of this book, is this comparatively young, although by now well-established, tradition of qualitative research in communicative disorders. Our approach to the analysis of interaction or discourse brings with it certain assumptions and practices, which we revisit repeatedly and in some detail as we progress through the book:
1. Our focus on communication disorder could be described as contextualized and emergent. The object of analysis is the interaction between two or more human beings as it unfolds. Order or disorder, success or breakdown in communication, arise out of the unfolding interaction in its context. Communicative interaction is a joint, collabo-
rative, distributed, and contextually situated activity. Disorder, in this perspective, is not primarily concerned with the limitations of an individual person’s communicative faculties but with the mutually perceived success or lack thereof of a communicative interaction. This also implies that communicative disorder, for our purposes, needs to be described, analyzed, and understood within the realm of real communicative events: the prototypical such event being conversation.1
