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This research paper explores the relationship between pragmatic functions on conversational-discursive development and the gestures, within McNeill's (2016) theoretical frame, appeared along with these functions. In order to achieve this, firstly, linguistics structures that carry out pragmatics functions are recognized; secondly, the interrelation that this pragmatically marked structures with gestures is described; and, thirdly, frequent relations are analyzed in terms of the cooccurrence of such communicational resources. Furthermore, it is presented a first attempt to describe sexual variation about the relation between pragmatic management and gestures. The analyses of six conversational narrations conclude there are some relations between given topic (GTop) and completive focus (FocCompl) with various types of gestures. These cooccurrences are nonstatic and should be reviewed in a more extensive corpus. Also, data shows that male-female couples present more pragmatically marked functions than the other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the linguistic and textual procedures through which adolescent subjects reformulate metaphorical expressions in a conversational context. My purpose is to examine the nature of the resources used in said reformulation, and to specifically analyze the procedures of metadiscursive qualification (Gülich and Kotschi 1995; Ciapuscio 2007a, 2007b) through which speakers comment and/or evaluate metaphorical expressions: the study reviews their presence, distribution and variation in exchanges among adolescent subjects who have been asked to reformulate metaphorical expressions in the context of a face-to-face conversation. My aim is to elucidate the extent to which the type and frequency of metadiscursive qualification accompanying and signaling reformulation processes are correlated with the degree of conventionality of the reformulated metaphorical expressions and, additionally, to contribute to the research on metaphor in a text corpus, especially, to the question regarding the conventional vs. innovative character of metaphors (Hanks 2004, 2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study starts from the premise that the linguistic skills of grammatical nature involved in speech production of children with Asperger syndrome are shown intact or unaltered, whereas most of the dysfunctions in the discursive dimension are associated to specifically pragmatic skills. This idea is compatible with the underconnectivity theory, according to which there would be a neurophysiological correlate capable of explaining such discrepancies between grammatical and pragmatic skills. Likewise, it is considered that communicative dysfunctions in Asperger syndrome may be due to an integration deficit. In order to support these assumptions, the analysis of different categories is carried out; more exactly, grammatical skills (syntactic complexity and lexical diversity, cohesion and coherence) are compared to pragmatic skills (principle of cooperation and editing tasks). For this, forty recordings transcribed in CHAT format (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) were taken into account. Twenty of them came from speakers with Asperger syndrome, and the other twenty, from speakers without this disorder. The results of this analysis reinforce the starting point of the paper, according to which there would be clear dissonances between the structural abilities of language and the communicative ones. Finally, with the ambition to reach a greater comprehension about communication disorders, particularly about Asperger syndrome, this research seeks an interdisciplinary connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a set of narratives on critical episodes by people affected by migraine. The voice of patients has acquired higher relevance in recent years, after being long postponed in the field of medicine. Linguistic research on patients' discourse can contribute to the knowledge on and understanding of this disorder, and even to its diagnosis, as shown among others by the researches on cardiac and convulsive illnesses carried out by German and British teams (Gülich and Schöndienstt, 1999; Schwabe et al., 2008; Schwabe et al., 2007). In this article I present, from the perspective of conceptual metaphor theory and of discursive production theory, an analysis of a corpus of patient narratives in which people explain their migraine attacks: I am interested in expanding the knowledge on how these patients conceptualize and transmit their illness and its main symptom, i.e. headache. The analysis of patients' contributions focuses both on the qualitative aspects of pain and on the description of its intensity, which is particularly rich as regards expressive procedures and resources and leads, occasionally, to the thematization of feelings of fear and panic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]