Medieval Pragmatics: Philosophical and Grammatical Contexts

This chapter discusses grammar and pragmatic thinking in the schools after 1050, focusing on internal history and semiotics. Roger Bacon and Peter (of) John Olivi proposed far-reaching theories of language and meaning with pragmatic perspectives. Bacon foregrounded pragmatic understanding in his semiotics of language and proposed context and communicative effectiveness rather than formal completion as the criteria for linguistic acceptability. Grammarians’ analysis of interjections, speech fragments, and emotional expressions opened new ways of understanding meaning-making, discursive interaction, and double articulation within a grammatical system and new pragmatic thinking about signification, reference, and affect. Olivi’s pragmatic approaches to some philosophical and theological accounts of language and expression focused on speakers’ and listeners’ responsibilities and how words’ meanings and contexts can change over time.

Clinical Effectiveness of the Queen Square Intensive Comprehensive Aphasia Service for Patients With Poststroke Aphasia

Background and Purpose: Poststroke aphasia has a major impact on peoples’ quality of life. Speech and language therapy interventions work, especially in high doses, but these doses are rarely achieved outside of research studies. Intensive Comprehensive Aphasia Programs (ICAPs) are an option to deliver high doses of therapy to people with aphasia over a short period of time. Methods: Forty-six people with aphasia in the chronic stage poststroke completed the ICAP over a 3-week period, attending for 15 days and averaging 6 hours of therapy per day. Outcome measures included the Comprehensive Aphasia Test, an impairment-based test of the 4 main domains of language (speaking, writing, auditory comprehension, and reading) which was measured at 3 time points (baseline, immediately posttreatment at 3 weeks and follow-up at 12-week post-ICAP); and, the Communicative Effectiveness Index, a carer-reported measure of functional communication skills collected at baseline and 12 weeks. Results: A 2-way repeated measures multivariate ANOVA was conducted. We found a significant domain-by-time interaction, F =12.7, P <0.0005, indicating that the ICAP improved people with aphasia’s language scores across all 4 domains, with the largest gains in speaking (Cohen’s d =1.3). All gains were maintained or significantly improved further at 12-week post-ICAP. Importantly, patients’ functional communication, as indexed by changes on the Communicative Effectiveness Index, also significantly improved at 12-week post-ICAP, t =5.4, P <0.0005, also with a large effect size (Cohen’s d =0.9). Conclusions: People with aphasia who participated in the Queen Square ICAP made large and clinically meaningful gains on both impairment-based and functional measures of language. Gains were sustained and in some cases improved further over the subsequent 12 weeks.

Artistic imagery in advertising: experiencing advertisements through art

The general aim of this research is to address the importance of considering visual artistic imagery in engaging consumers for persuasion effects. In this study, I present properties of visual images crucial for aesthetic value and possible modes of engagement with artistic advertisements. I argue that both a visual rhetorical figure and a high sensory quality function to “make the familiar strange” and to engage recipients in the ad. The communicative effectiveness is tested through the experience of pleasure, immersion, narrative transportation, ad experience (involving sensory, cognitive and affective elaboration) and personal involvement. The results of the experiment show that a visual rhetorical figure and a high sensory quality of an ad influence communicative effectiveness of picture-based artistic advertisement. Plausibly, by making familiar strange, artistic ads become effective communicative tools, as they give an opportunity to engage with an ad in different ways and boost ad experience. It seems also that using artistic ads can be particularly effective in communicating brand personality. This research advances the theory and practice of communicative effectiveness of picture-based artistic advertisements.

Contextualizing Morphosyntactic Features in Wole Soyinka’s Ake-the Years of Childhood

The term ‘morpho-syntax’ has a dual meaning because it is a combination of both morphology and syntax. These two are language components that a stylistician can adopt in any write-up. This act by a stylistician is what brings about the uniqueness of a write-up which is based on individual’s use of language. It is also termed the morphology of linguistics adopted by a writer to achieve communicative effectiveness. Wole Soyinka’s language is said to be complex to most readers, possibly due to the morpho-syntactic features inherent in his text. Thus, the thrust of this paper is to identify the morpho-syntactic features and to discover the reason for the complexity of Wole Soyinka’s language in his book titled: Ake- The Years of Childhood. Using the functional stylistics as our model of analysis, we examined factors that are obviously and silently responsible for his complexity of languages, such as code-mixing, direct translation from Yoruba into English, a single word or sentence having several interpretations, coinages and his sentence structures. From our analysis, we discovered that the factors mentioned above are actually responsible for the complexity of Soyinka’s language and truly his use of language stands as a barrier to general readers comprehending most of his works.

Motor Speech Disorders and Communication Limitations in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy

Purpose This study describes motor speech disorders and associated communication limitations in six variants of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). Method The presence, nature, and severity of dysarthria and apraxia of speech (AOS) were documented, along with scores on the Apraxia of Speech Rating Scale–Version 3 (ASRS-3) for 77 (40 male and 37 female) patients with PSP. Clinician-estimated and patient-estimated communication limitations were rated using the Motor Speech Disorders Severity Rating (MSDSR) Scale and the Communicative Effectiveness Survey (CES), respectively. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each of these dependent variables. One-tailed t tests were conducted to test mean differences in ASRS-3 and CES between participants with and without AOS and between participants with and without dysarthria. Spearman rank correlations were calculated between ASRS-3 scores and clinical judgments of AOS and dysarthria severity and between MSDSR and CES ratings. Results Nine participants (12%) had normal speech. Eighty-seven percent exhibited dysarthria; hypokinetic and mixed hypokinetic–spastic dysarthria were observed most frequently. AOS was observed in 19.5% of participants across all variants, but in only 10% exclusive of the PSP speech and language variant. Nearly half presented with AOS in which neither phonetic nor prosodic features clearly predominated. The mean ASRS-3 score for participants with AOS was significantly higher than for those without and correlated strongly with clinician judgment of AOS severity. Mean ASRS-3 was higher for participants with dysarthria than for those without but correlated weakly with dysarthria severity. Mean MSDSR and CES ratings were lower in participants with AOS compared to those without and moderately correlated with each other. Conclusions Motor speech disorders that negatively impact communicative effectiveness are common in PSP and occur in many variants. This is the first description of motor speech disorders across PSP variants, setting the stage for future research characterizing neuroanatomical correlates, progression of motor speech disorders, and benefits of targeted interventions. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14111837