Crazy Talk: A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers (Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics)

"This book is a study of discourse-the flow of talk-of schizophrenic speakers. Our goal is to understand the processes which account for the ordinary flow of talk that happens all the time between speakers and lisƯ teners. How do conversations happen? What is needed by a listener to follow a speaker's words and respond appropriately to them? How much can a speaker take for granted and how much must be stated explicitly for the listener to follow the speaker's meanings readily and easily? Each time we ask these questions, we seem to have to go back to some place prior to the "ordinary" adult conversation. This time, we have tried reversing the questions and asking: What happens when conversaƯ tion fails? Prompted in part by an early paper by Robin Lakoff to the ChiƯ cago Linguistics Society and by Herb Clark's studies of listener processes, we wondered what a speaker has to do to make the listener finally stop making allowances and stop trying to adjust the conversational contract to cooperate. This inquiry led us to the schizophrenic speaker. When a listener decides that the speaker's talk is "crazy," he or she is giving up on the normal form of conversation and saying, in effect, this talk is exƯ traordinary and something is wrong. We thought that, if we could specify what makes a conversation fail, we might learn what has to be present for a conversation to succeed"--Font no determinada Front Matter....Pages i-xii Thought Disorder and Language Use in Schizophrenia....Pages 1-54 Procedures....Pages 55-72 Cohesion....Pages 73-102 Reference as a Speech Art....Pages 103-118 Presenting Information in Texts....Pages 119-138 Presuming Information from the Culture and from the Situation....Pages 139-168 The Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers: A Discussion....Pages 169-203 Back Matter....Pages 205-229