Linguistics for Clinicians

A Practical Introduction

Maria Black, Shula Chiat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134632381
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Linguistics for Clinicians provides an introduction to linguistic analysis in the clinical context. The book draws on a range of linguistic theories and descriptions, equipping readers with a conceptual toolkit that will enable them to: analyse data systematically, taking into account different types of linguistic properties; pick out significant patterns that can give them clinically relevant cues; build explicit arguments to back up their observations and hypotheses; select relevant linguistic items for assessment and therapy tasks.



The syntactic sections cover standard concepts and their application to a range of data is worked through step by step. This solid grounding in syntax provides a springboard for detailed analyses of sentence semantics and sentence phonology which are particularly relevant in clinical assessment and therapy, but are not usually available outside specialist linguistic texts. These sections cover: event structure and its representation by verbs and their complements; the timing and modality of events and their representation by the auxiliary system; rhythmic patterns of sentences and how the type and position of individual words influences them.



Clinical relevance is a central theme throughout the book. All linguistic concepts are introduced with examples of their clinical use. Analytical tips are included to anticipate and deal with common problems of clinical application. Extensive exercises further illustrate the use of linguistic concepts in data analysis and task construction.



Linguistics for Clinicians is primarily a linguistics textbook for students and teachers on clinical courses. It is also a useful resource for practising clinicians, psycholinguitics students and researchers in language impairments.

I

Introduction

1

Guide to this book

1.1 For students

This book is about some of the concepts you need to analyse language as a speech and language therapist. What do we mean by ‘language’? Language is one of the many forms of communication human beings have at their disposal. It is a system for conveying and receiving meanings through sounds (oral language), characters (writing), and hand-gestures (sign language). In this sense, it is like gesture, touch, painting, drawing, photography, music, sculpture, dancing and any other form of communication you can think of, but is also quite different, with its own properties and unique ways of conveying meanings. Much of this book is about these properties and what you need to describe them – you can dip your toes in language straightaway by reading Chapter 2.

Language is a very efficient system of communication. You can test this for yourself by trying to convey to another person the exact meaning expressed by a piece of language such as:

My friend has left her purse in your room.

using only other forms of communication – for instance, gesture, drawing, or pointing to objects. To take just two examples, how would you gesture or draw left as opposed to put or forgot, and has left as opposed to just left?

For the beginner, however, language always presents a puzzle. It is something so simple and common that even young children can learn it without special training or education. You will have lived with at least one language for many years and feel quite at home in it. Yet, when we start thinking about it more systematically, it all becomes rather complex and abstract. It is difficult to grasp that abstraction and complexity are precisely what makes language such an efficient and flexible form of communication. So the first thing you need to get the most out of this book is a willingness to be puzzled by things you took for granted.

In trying to hold on to something more solid, people often end up confusing language with one of its physical manifestations – speech. You should resist the false comfort of this confusion and remember that, since you can have one without the other, language and speech cannot be the same thing. If a raging sore throat deprived you of speech, you would still have language. You would still understand what others said or wrote to you: you could still write and have mental conversations with yourself. But if you lost your language, many of these things would become difficult or impossible, as can happen to people after a stroke or a head injury. This is hard to imagine but you can get a sense of what losing language might be like by reading the account by Chris Ireland (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 The insight story

Extracted from Ireland, C. and Black, M. (1992)

I have a language problem, not a communication problem. Part of brain is dead but with a loss also a gain if work to build inner insight and strength. I think I am better communicator than before the stroke. My language is closer to my feelings.

Everyday is not a joy. Daily demands. Travelling difficult, noise and nausea. Pain permeates in my life. I can very aware of the noise. External noise interview … interferes me to listen. I can’t concentrate with it. I can’t screen it out.

It does take me more time to cotton what is going on. I am a bit slow to take it in but deeper perhaps. I lose something on the surface but I gain something else. But practically you need surface. My thoughts and emotions are so bigger and quicker than my language tools. I cannot compete clever with words but I’m still clever, still reflective.

In June 1988 I had a stroke. First thing in the morning I tried to get up and fell on the floor. When my mother came to me, I tried to tell her what had happened. Only strange sounds came from me. I see her mouth to move but I did not feel my right arm. I felt so frustrated, confused and anger creeped with me.

My inner thoughts were felt so very alone. My family and friends reach to me to try ways to communicate. I picked up that they felt helpless and mixtures of feelings – worry, bewildered, and anger too. My friend told me by writing down that I was saying only ‘miff’. I did not monitor my language at all.

I understand more about my problems with language now. I enjoy talking perhaps even more than I did before. I have more pause and, if I don’t, I have more errors. I haven’t lose my excitement in me and if I get excited I make more errors. It doesn’t worry me but it is embarrass to other the people at times. It depends on who they are with me. I do get fed up a few people make jokes of language to me. I irritated for people to take it up. It is difficult. Sometimes I want to laugh with them at my errors and sometimes I am not in the mood. And they do understand what we are going to talk about, there is enough information and communication. Why do they have to pick it up? If a person is with somebody with aphasia that person should say if they don’t understand, like you would anyone else. That’s respect. But people who correct you in the middle of you speaking, they make furious. They shut you up. If people knew what I was trying to say well enough to correct, why bother?

Reading is hard and less pleasure than before. So frustrating: means me cut off to learn knowledge. Belong in my private word, … world. I can’t follow poetry, understand puns and symbolism. I complain I lost poetry. My friends say I tapped on some new poetry, my own poetry. When I tried to read what I had written, I found it so hard with my raw errors. I could read ‘correct’ versions not too bad. Part of my brain knows the rules of reading and barks at errors. Now allow me to write more flowly, direct with errors and feel more freer. So glad I can able writing enough to communicate. Unable to write would be powerless and more lonely. Yes, mine not good grammar but alive.

On the other hand, you could lose almost all physical manifestations of language, and still have language ‘in your head’, as the so-called ‘locked-in-syndrome’ demonstrates. Sufferers of this condition can be completely unable to move or speak and yet still be able to compose phrases and sentences in their heads and convey them letter by letter by blinking at the appropriate character on a letter board (see J-D. Bauby’s vivid account in The diving bell and the butterfly). You might find this quite surprising. So the other things you will need in working through this book are an open mind and a capacity to look at old things in new ways without letting go completely of what you know already about your own language.

What you do not need is any knowledge of ‘grammar’ as all the concepts and terms are defined and exemplified in detail in the book itself. We have tried to keep technical terms to a minimum and only use them when necessary to provide you with essential analytical tools. So, if you start thinking ‘this is more complicated than it need be’, have a little faith and eventually you will see that the complexity was necessary. You are most likely to have that reaction when tackling the parts of the book that deal with meaning – Part III, for example. Analysing meaning is not something you would have done very much in your previous education. You are used to understanding and producing complex meanings very quickly and the efficiency of language can lull you into a false sense of simplicity. To discover the complexity and subtlety of linguistic meaning can be both exciting and unsettling.

If things get too unsettling, go back to the sections entitled ‘Why we need these concepts’, which are a regular feature of each chapter. In those sections we have tried to explain, in a way that does not presuppose any specialist clinical knowledge, why the concepts discussed in the chapter are useful. These are only signposts, though. Do not expect a full description of language impairments, how language is represented in the brain or how we can treat different language problems. That is not what this book is about. Understanding the concepts and learning to apply them in a clinically relevant way will take time and practice – the pieces of the puzzle will not fit together straightaway.

This is not a book that you can just read through once. You cannot learn to analyse language just by reading – that is why each chapter ends with a range of exercises. You will need to read each chapter several times, do the exercises, compare what you did with the keys or models provided and return to the text again. Some of the same data pop up in different exercises. This is so that you can learn to look at data from different points of view, focusing only on what is relevant to the issue in hand. All the exercises in this book have been tried and completed by students; in fact, we have included some of our students’ answers and ideas as models. The exercises show you how to put linguistic concepts to practical clinical use.

As the book is the product of over 20 years of teaching, research and clinical experience, we have tried to anticipate the most common problems and questions in the ways concepts are explained and worked through. We have also included in most chapters a section entitled ‘Analytical tips’, which should keep you on track. Pay particular attention to the Analytical tips in Part II where you encounter for the first time many methods of analysis and types of arguments that will occur again and again throughout the book. Although Part II deals with particular aspects of linguistic structure (what linguists call ‘syntax’ and the lay person ‘grammar’), it is also a kind of linguistic playground, where you can explore what counts as a pattern in language, how to look...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Syntax
• Part III Syntax – semantic links: situations
• Part IV Syntax – semantic links: time and modality
• Part V Syntax – phonology links
• Keys to exercises
• Further reading
• References
• Index