This book investigates the ways in which context shapes how cognitive challenges and strengths are navigated and how these actions impact the self-esteem of individuals with dementia and their conversational partners. The author examines both the language used and face maintenance in everyday social interaction through the lens of epistemic discourse analysis. In doing so, this work reveals how changes in cognition may impact the faces of these individuals, leading some to feel ashamed, anxious, or angry, others to feel patronized, infantilized, or overly dependent, and still others to feel threatened in both ways. It further examines how discursive choices made by healthy interactional partners can minimize or exacerbate these feelings. This path-breaking work will provide important insights for students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, medical anthropology, and health communication. 
Heidi E. Hamilton is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, USA. She is an expert on the interrelationships between language and health care issues. Her previous works on this topic include Conversations with an Alzheimer’s Patient (1994) and Language and Communication in Old Age (1999).

“This book offers the most complex and up-to-date understanding of the social nature of human cognition. Hamilton takes us on a journey—at once personal and yet at once universal—from her first book on dementia and conversations to the present one on understanding memory as dynamic, evolving, fluid and fully sociolinguistic. This is a very necessary read for all scholars researching issues of memory, language and sociocognition.” (Vaidehi Ramanathan, Professor of Linguistics, University of California, USA)

“In a deeply-researched discussion as remarkable for its clarity as for its emphasis on empathetic interaction,  Hamilton asks these questions not only for us but also for our partners with dementia: How is it that we can say we know – and how do we use those memories we can access – to recognize and share our knowing in our efforts to make meaning when we are talking to another person? How do those efforts to make meaning help or hinder speakers with and without dementia in retaining self-worth, a positive self-image, a “face?” Hamilton draws on a lifetime of thought and research to involve readers with “the complexity of meaning making”, whether the speaker is looking for a word, performing fragments of a song, recalling immediate events, or reconstituting previous aspects of ones’ life.” (Boyd H. Davis, Bonnie E. Cone Professor of Teaching in Applied Linguistics/English and Professor of Gerontology at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA)

 

Highlights the complex connections between the linguistic and cognitive changes that accompany dementia and an individual’s sense of self Examines language used by individuals with dementia within a wide range of situations, including audio recordings of conversations, medical visits, and memory loss support groups Approaches dementia as a human issue within multiple linguistic and social contexts

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