Abstract
In this chapter, we explore key discursive patterns that underlie interactions that contain evidence of problems with memory about the recent past. Toward this end, we first situate the examination of these difficulties within ‘episodic memory’ (Tulving, Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of memory. Oxford: Academic, 1972; Kesney and Hunsacker, Behavioral Brain Research, 215(2), 299–309, 2010). We then characterize resourceful strategies used by some individuals with dementia to figure out how to answer questions by conversational partners that have uncovered a memory gap, followed by descriptions of repetitive language used by individuals with dementia in situations where they appear to have forgotten what they had just said or what they had just asked. We then focus on strategies used by conversational partners in the face of these stark memory problems, as they dismiss the need to recall the memory in question, build on the instance of forgetting, or change the topic abruptly.
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Notes
- 1.
It is intriguing to consider the important epistemic distinction between I must have forgotten and I forgot. The former instance indicates that the speaker does not even recall that he or she should have known the issue at question in the first place—and has only become aware of that fact through a presupposition in a discursive move by the conversational partner.
- 2.
I am very grateful for insightful discussions with my then research assistant Marta Baffy as we examined these interactions in preparation for Hamilton and Baffy (2014).
- 3.
I took this term to mean ‘the lounge’ as Elsie regularly referred to this space in this way (due perhaps to her word-finding difficulties). This information dovetailed with my prior knowledge regarding the practices in the assisted living center, where residents typically gathered to eat in a lounge rather than in a dining room. Note also my repetition of her term ‘up there’ in line 10 in my response in line 13.
- 4.
Minor differences in the way in which this strategy was employed in Excerpt 3.20 in Sect. 3.6.4 and Excerpt 4.14 in this section are due primarily to the shape of the question that displayed the memory problem (Did I say that? in Excerpt 3.20 and What did I say? in Excerpt 4.14). The yes/no question in Excerpt 3.20 opened the opportunity for the ‘yes-and’ technique from improvisational theater to be implemented, as described in Sect. 3.6.4. This contrasts slightly with the wh-question used in this section which was followed by a content-level filling in of the episodic memory gap (That you felt infantilized) that was then used as a scaffold by the individual with dementia on which to build her subsequent conversational contributions.
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Hamilton, H.E. (2019). “Did I have chicken for lunch?”. In: Language, Dementia and Meaning Making. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12021-4_4
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