ПРАГМАТИЧКА АНАЛИЗА ЈЕЗИЧКЕ ПРОДУКЦИЈЕ БРОКИНЕ И ВЕРНИКЕОВЕ АФАЗИЈЕ
A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE PRODUCTION IN BROCAʼS AND WERNICKEʼS APHASIA

Summary/Abstract: In the nineteenth century, Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke offered a scientific explanation of the language phenomenon that dated all the way back to antiquity. The loss of ability to produce fluent and meaningful speech, including writing, reading or understanding language – aphasia – was attributed to the damage of brain areas that carry the names of the aforementioned scientists, who discovered in what way the areas are significant for human languages. The discoveries of these two scientists gave birth to neurolinguistics, a discipline that studies the relation of the brain to language, and localism, a theory according to which linguistic abilities (the so-called modalities) are localized in certain brain areas of the left hemisphere. The two best known aphasias are Broca’s and Wernicke’s. This paper primarily deals with the analysis of language production in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia from the perspective of the Gricean pragmatics and its main categories: the Cooperative Principle and the maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner. The categories are extremely useful for that purpose because they epitomize the essential characteristics of successful human communication. The goal of this paper is to shed light on how maxims are treated in aphasic communication and to determine the ways and frequency of their violation. The analysis of the existing neurological literature and a corpus of 24 carefully selected examples of aphasic communication revealed that maxim violation is part and parcel of both aphasias. The maxim violation in Broca’s aphasia entails primarily the violations of quantity and manner. The maxim violation in Wernicke’s aphasia is more complex and entails primarily frequent, if not constant violations of quantity, relation and manner.

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