Challenging common sense about nonsense : an integrational approach to schizophrenic language behaviour

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-168).Due to certain fundamental flaws, orthodox linguistics has not succeeded in producing a coherent account of 'schizophrenic language' - the host of symptoms that are alternatively characterised as evidence of formal thought disorder or labelled as disorganised speech, a disorder in itself. The most important of these flaws are its treatment of languages as fixed codes, which doubles as an explanation of how linguistic communication works, and its postulation of the mental structures that would be necessary if languages were indeed fixed codes, and communication a matter of encoding and decoding messages. In particular, orthodox linguistics has bolstered the now-dominant neo-Kraepelinian, biomedical account of schizophrenia, which treats utterances as symptoms that give clues to brain (dis)organisation and (dys) function. Integrational linguistics, which criticises the culturally based assumptions - collectively referred to as 'the language myth' - that are at the heart of the orthodox account of languages and language, provides an alternative. It sympathises with the growing trend in cognitive science and philosophy towards 'embodiment' and 'distributed cognition', which recognises that encultured entities like languages, minds, brains, bodies, and world are intrinsically defined by their co-evolution in the species, and co-emergence during an individual's development. Integrationists argue that by focusing in the first instance on second-order cultural constructs called 'languages', orthodox linguistics fails to give an account of the first-order experience of language users. This thesis approaches the topic of 'schizophrenic language' from a broadly integrationist perspective in order to demonstrate that because orthodox linguistics is so widely taken for granted in psychiatry, its biases inform current mainstream accounts of schizophrenic language, motivate the outright dismissal of interpersonal accounts, past and present, and provide a skewed picture of the phenomenon it purports to be describing, by ultimately constructing an individual-focused, deficit-based account of what is not, as opposed to what is. That is, by holding up orthodox linguistics' idealised version of communication and speakers (which has little applicability even to 'normal' language users), it uses deviation from the ideal as description and explanation, rather than recognising the strategies actually employed by schizophrenics in their attempts to make sense, even if these attempts fail. The alternative argued for here is to apply the tenets of integrationist linguistics to schizophrenic language behaviour, to give a fuller account of communication situations involving schizophrenics and normal interlocutors. As a result, this thesis calls for a reformulation of the idea that incomprehensibility stems from deviant speech, itself the product of an irrational brain. 'Sense', 'deviance' and 'irrationality' are a moment-to-moment metalinguistic appraisals made by language users, second-order cultural constructions that shape the speech community's response to certain individuals. Describing the speech of schizophrenics as 'deviant', 'irrational', or 'nonsensical' constrains their jointly-constructed capability of making sense using the resources (which may include other individual's minds) at their disposal. Integration linguistics thus brings into focus a moral and political dimension to such descriptions which is obscured by an orthodox linguistics-biased biomedical approach