Section: New Results

Modeling pathological discourse

Participant : Maxime Amblard.

Maxime Amblard starts a conjoint work with a psychologist Michel Musiol (IntePsy) and a philosopher Manuel Rebuschi (Archives Poincaré) about developing a formal analysis of pathological conversations involving schizophrenic speakers [18] . Such conversations give rise to manifest incongruities or ruptures that can be seen as mere contradictions by any “normal” speaker. Our construal relies both on semantic and pragmatic features of conversation. After an overview on the making of the corpus, we propose a SDRT-inspired account of pathological conversations, and we apply it to two relevant excerpts. We conclude with a short discussion about the localization of incoherencies by schizophrenics, either in semantics or in pragmatics, and its importance for our understanding of thought disorders.