Rosana do Carmo Novaes Pinto

Semiologia das Afasias: Uma Discussão Crítica

The article discusses the semiology of aphasias, which started being developed in the 19th century by Broca and Wernicke. We do not provide an exhaustive list of symptoms and syndromes to address the theme, since we aim to critically discuss why the semiology of aphasias is still based mainly on organic perspectives in clinical practice and scientific research. We also discuss the contributions of Luria and Jakobson to a better understanding of how language is affected in aphasias and how Modern Linguistics, in special the Discursive Neurolinguistics, may enlighten the debate. We analyze some data to illustrate the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the above mentioned approaches and also discuss the excessive strength that classifications have in the clinical context.

A Social Cultural-Approach to Aphasia: Contributions from the Work Developed at a Center for Aphasic Subjects

Writing a chapter about aphasia from a social-cultural perspective is a great challenge, considering the respect gained by the huge amount of research guided by what we will be calling, in this work, “traditional approaches”. We believe therefore to be relevant, before starting our discussion, to situate the locus of our work with aphasia – the field of Linguistics, more specifically the Discursive Neurolinguistics which has been developed at the Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), in Brazil. One of the main features that differentiates our research from the work developed in other centers in Brazil and abroad is its strong connection with linguistic theories, especially the ones developed in the second half of the 20th century, such as Enunciative Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, which strongly influence the way we approach theoretically and methodologically the aphasia phenomena. From a unique locus, we believe Linguistics may contribute to a better description and understanding of how language and its several functions and speech genres can be impacted by brain injuries, considering what has been learnt about normal functioning for almost a century of development of this field as a science.