​This book examines the under-researched field of communication by bilingual people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). The aging population is increasingly affected by neurocognitive diseases such as DAT, and over the past 30 years, the growing research body concerned with monolingual DAT discourses has seen significant growth. The findings from monolingual studies and institutional settings highlight the importance of code choice for a person’s sense of autonomy, especially against the background of changing communicational abilities. Adding a new perspective, this book investigates how ten Puerto Rican speakers living with varying stages of DAT draw on their bilingual resources to accomplish verbal interaction in informal settings with their primary care partners. Drawing on narrative interviews conducted in Orlando, Florida, this multi-case study investigates situated language choices and code-switches by applying the ethno-social approach, i.e. combining features of conversation analysis and ethnography of communication. The author sheds light both on the question of how people living with DAT engage in conversations and which strategies they employ in their languages (English and Spanish) to reach their communicative goals. Specifically, by analyzing the role of code choice and code-switching in a qualitative manner, two main functional categories emerge: discourse-related and participant-related code-switching. Bilingual competencies remain even among participants living with severe DAT symptoms, as evident in retained interactional sequences such as salutations. Persons living with DAT competently negotiate code, either through exploratory code-switching or metalinguistic commentary, emphasizing the need for conversational partners to be sensitive to the communicative needs, in both languages, of speakers living with DAT. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on dementia discourses, health communication, multilingualism and ageing, as well as Bilingual/ Multilingual families or individuals living with dementia.

A book on those who know and use two or more languages: Who are they? How do they do it?

Using linguistic data, this book examines language and communication in dementias and their clinical treatment by language pathologists.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this seventh volume underlines the mutually constitutive relation between society and language use. It highlights a number of the most prominent approaches of this relation and it draws attention to a selected number of topics that the study of language in its social context has characteristically brought to bear. Despite their theoretical and methodological differences, each of the chapters in this book assumes that it is necessary to look at society and language use as interdependent phenomena, and that by attending to microscopic linguistic phenomena one is also keeping a finger on the pulse of broader, macroscopic social tendencies that at the same time facilitate and constrain language use. The introduction provides a sketch of the intellectual antecedents of the volume’s two ‘mother disciplines’, viz., linguistics and social theory before pointing at recent common ground in the rising attention for discourse and what has come to be called ‘late-modernity’.

The most comprehensive overview available, this Handbook is an essential guide to sociolinguistics today. Reflecting the breadth of research in the field, it surveys a range of topics and approaches in the study of language variation and use in society. As well as linguistic perspectives, the handbook includes insights from anthropology, social psychology, the study of discourse and power, conversation analysis, theories of style and styling, language contact and applied sociolinguistics. Language practices seem to have reached new levels since the communications revolution of the late twentieth century. At the same time face-to-face communication is still the main force of language identity, even if social and peer networks of the traditional face-to-face nature are facing stiff competition of the Facebook-to-Facebook sort. The most authoritative guide to the state of the field, this handbook shows that sociolinguistics provides us with the best tools for understanding our unfolding evolution as social beings.