This article presents an analysis of conversation between people with linguistic impairment as a consequence of aphasia and their interlocutors. The challenge faced by linguistic-impaired conversationalists in achieving successful interaction provides an insight which highlights the essentially collaborative construction of all communication and the manner in which meanings are progressively negotiated and agreed over an often quite lengthy conversational sequence. In this article, extracts of conversation are used to illustrate the insights granted by the socially oriented, data-driven approach of Conversation Analysis into the process of aphasic interaction. The relative contributions of an analysis of this kind, and the type of analysis provided by Relevance Theory, a cognitively oriented model of communication, are briefly assessed.
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Perkins et al. (1997) studied this question.