Conversation in aphasia: An analysis of the discursive topic and conversational turn under a textual-interactive perspective

This article aims at analyzing excerpts of an interaction in a group of practice of aphasic and non-aphasic people in order to demonstrate the developments of the discursive topic and the conversational time. To achieve this goal, the theoretical approach of this work is grounded in the textual-interactive perspective, developed at the interface between Textual Linguistics and Conversation Analysis. The analyses show that the aphasic group members, when inserted in conversational situations, act in exchanges of conversational time and development of the topic, contributing to the engagement and maintenance of the conversation. These results enable an observation that even up against undeniable linguistic deficits entailed by aphasia, aphasics demonstrate that the knowledge of conversational rules have not been destroyed or lost as a result of the condition of the linguistic system. They also recognize the textual-interactive configuration of conversation expressed by movements of the topic and dynamics time.