Crazy Talk A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers
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 lis teners. How do conversations happen? What
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COGNITION AND LANGUAGE A Series in Psycholinguistics Series Editor: R. W. Rieber
CRAZY TALK: A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers Sherry Rochester and J. R. Martin CLINICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Theodore Shapiro PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND LEARNING O. Hobart Mowrer
A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher.
CRAZY TALK A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers Sherry Rochester Clarke Institute of Psychiatry Toronto, Ontario, Canada
and
J. R. Martin
The University of Sydney Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Plenum Press · New York and London
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rochester, SheD'Y. Crazy talk. Includes index. 1. Schizophrenics - Language. I. Martin, J. R., joint author. 1. Schizophrenic language. WM203.3 R676c} RC514.R56 616.8'982
ISBN 978-1-4615-9121-4 DOl 10.1007/978-1-4615-9119-1
n. Title. [DNLM: 79-11978
ISBN 978-1-4615-9119-1 (eBook)
IS) 1979 Plenum Press, New York Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979 A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 227 West 17th Street, New York, N.Y. 100 11
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Preface
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 listeners. 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 conversation fails? Prompted in part by an early paper by Robin Lakoff to the Chicago 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 extraordinary 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. We intended to study the conversations of schizophrenic patients with clinicians who decided, at some point, that the conversations
