The Construct of Stance as a Unifying Framework to Understand the Communicative Functionality of Narrators and Co-Narrators with Aphasia in Conversational Settings

EasyChair Preprint 6822

Abstract

The ubiquity of personal narration in everyday life has catalyzed lines of research on narration by people with aphasia. Traditional studies of elicited narration of people with aphasia have preceded recent lines of research on their spontaneous embedding of narration and co-narration during conversation. Analysis of linguistic contributions to narrative-in-conversation is undergirded by converging theoretical models of stance, stance intersubjectivity, linguistic evaluative devices, and the contrast between modalising and referential language.  Data were drawn from a 45-minute conversational aphasia-group session, selected for its display of multiple exemplars of spontaneous, conversationally-embedded personal narration and co-narration.  The conversationalists were six adults with aphasia (five male, one female; collectively representing a variety of aphasia types and severities); and four female adult student clinicians. At least 18 primary-teller narratives, of a variety of lengths, were embedded in the conversation; each was co-narrated with others. Estimated time spent in narration comprised 62 percent of the session. Linguistic analysis of evaluative devices, semantic paraphrase, and syntactic parallelism across conversational turns reflected stance resonance among the interlocutors, regardless of aphasia status, although linguistic contributions to narration varied across individuals. Chains of stories on a thematic topic reflected parallel modalisation and stance, e.g. young age and low pay at the time of first employment, with collaborative input from all participants, regardless of aphasia status.  This instrumental case study illustrates a theoretically grounded phenomenological methodology designed to advance lines of research on linguistic contributions to conversational narration, and to reconcile the seemingly tenuous relationship between linguistic competence and naturally contextualized narrative abilities.

Keyphrases: Functionality, aphasia, case study, communication, conversation, discourse, linguistic evaluation, narration, stance

@booklet{EasyChair:6822,
  author    = {Gloria Streit Olness and Marion C. Leaman and Rosalia Dutra and Brent Archer},
  title     = {The Construct of Stance as a Unifying Framework to Understand the Communicative Functionality of Narrators and Co-Narrators with Aphasia in Conversational Settings},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6822},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}