HOW DO YOU SAY? AN ANALYSIS OF TEXTUAL-INTERACTIVE STRATEGIES IN THE NARRATIVE OF A PERSON WITH ALZHEIMER'S

Abstract Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a pathology usually recognized by cognitive decline that result in memory lapses, impairments in daily tasks, and difficulty in interacting through language. In this empirical domain, the present study analyzes the textual-interactional strategies used in the oral narrative, demonstrating how a person with AD succeeds, despite language deficits, in producing, sustaining and maintaining the narrative in a daily conversation interaction. The narrative analyzed in this study comes from a corpus of interactions of a participant affected by AD. We base our analysis on categories from the field of oral narrative analysis and textual linguistics. We mobilized, primarily, the dimensions of the narrative by Ochs and Capps (2001) and the notion of referencing by Mondada and Dubois (2003). The analyzes demonstrates that referential strategies, construction, retaking and negotiation of discourse objects are elements that constitute, according to a textual and interactive point of view, the narrative performance of a person living with Alzheimer's.