A Social Cultural-Approach to Aphasia: Contributions from the Work Developed at a Center for Aphasic Subjects

TLDR: In this paper, aphasia from a social-cultural perspective is discussed, considering the respect gained by the huge amount of research guided by what we will be calling, in this work, traditional approaches.

Abstract: Writing a chapter about aphasia from a social-cultural perspective is a great challenge, considering the respect gained by the huge amount of research guided by what we will be calling, in this work, “traditional approaches”. We believe therefore to be relevant, before starting our discussion, to situate the locus of our work with aphasia – the field of Linguistics, more specifically the Discursive Neurolinguistics which has been developed at the Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), in Brazil. One of the main features that differentiates our research from the work developed in other centers in Brazil and abroad is its strong connection with linguistic theories, especially the ones developed in the second half of the 20th century, such as Enunciative Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, which strongly influence the way we approach theoretically and methodologically the aphasia phenomena. From a unique locus, we believe Linguistics may contribute to a better description and understanding of how language and its several functions and speech genres can be impacted by brain injuries, considering what has been learnt about normal functioning for almost a century of development of this field as a science.