Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
-
Anne Fleche
Abstract
The writings by and about people with Alzheimer's dementia (PWAD) expose a crisis of indexicality. Specifically deixis, which connects the subject with the referent, breaks down in the absence of a knowable “deictic center.” Linguistic analysis of deixis has classically defined the problem of the subject as beyond the scope of the discipline, but recent work has begun to take it up. The work of linguists, caretakers, and Alzheimer's patients, read together with theories of writing, theatricality, and subjectivity, provides a cross-disciplinary view of deixis — naming, locating, and pointing — in theory and in the care of PWAD. There is a need for greater attention to this problem, especially as discourse on dementia tends to fall back on universal categories of the human.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- The biosemiosis of prescriptive information
- Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
- Modeling semiosis in Roentgen diagnosis
- The semiosis of stone: A “rocky” rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Charles Sanders Peirce
- Disability in African films: A semiotic analysis
- Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
- Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
- Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
- Double binds, triadic binds
- Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
- Picture, text, and imagetext: Textual polylogy
- Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder
- Comments concerning the artist in a Peircean perspective
- Seven short comments on pragmatic semeiotic and branding
Articles in the same Issue
- The biosemiosis of prescriptive information
- Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
- Modeling semiosis in Roentgen diagnosis
- The semiosis of stone: A “rocky” rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Charles Sanders Peirce
- Disability in African films: A semiotic analysis
- Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
- Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
- Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
- Double binds, triadic binds
- Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
- Picture, text, and imagetext: Textual polylogy
- Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder
- Comments concerning the artist in a Peircean perspective
- Seven short comments on pragmatic semeiotic and branding
