Discourse Ability and Brain Damage: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

The title of this book excited me. I thought, at last I would find out the truth about lateralization and localization of discourse abilities. I thought the chapters would c o n f m my suspicion that the right cerebral hemisphere is responsible for our ability to construct a narrative, understand a Story, draw inferences, and interpret ambiguous sentences. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Luckily for the future of neurolinguistics, the truth is never that simple. This collection of papers stems from a symposium at the 1986 Academy of Aphasia meeting. Additional authors were invited by the organizersleditors to contribute chapters representing the breadth of -research on discourse ability and brain damage. The editors have done an admirable job of selecting topics: Papers present data from adult aphasics, right brain-damaged adults, Alzheimer patients, and children with focal lesions. The contributions include discussion of most major areas of discourse research: inference, cohesion, coherence, story schema, narrative structure, and also some less traditional areas of pragmatic research, including code switching and gender-associated styles of verbal interaction. The book is organized into two sections. The first section (Chapters 1 4 ) is the “theoretical perspective” alluded to in the title. This section does not discuss brain damage directly, but rather reviews theoretical models of discourse. Considering the title, and my expectation that the bulk of the book would cover the intersection of Discourse Ability arid Brain Damage, it seemed to me that this section was rather overrepresented, and frankly, too long (110 pages of the 245 total). Chapter 1 (Discotirse Analysis iri Lirigriistics: Historical arid Tlieoretical Backgroiuid by Richard Patry and Jean-Luc Nespoulous) is a well-written historical overview which traces early approaches to discourse analysis from Vladimir Propp’s 1928 analysis of the structure of folk tales and the Prague School’s “functionalism” through current models of pragmatics and conversational analysis. This chapter defines and gives examples of many of the terms used recurrently throughout the text, including cohesion, coliererice, and macrostructure. It sets the tone for the entire book, emphasizing the necessity for exploring units of language structure beyond the sentence. Chapter 2 (The Psycltoliriguistics of Discourse Conipreliemiori by Gregory L. Murphy)