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This article reports on linguistic features and patterns of coherence in two levels (mild and advanced) of discourse produced by Alzheimer's patients. It argues and demonstrates that as the disease progresses, the discourse of Alzheimer's patients becomes pregrammatical in that it is vocabulary driven and reliant on meaning-based features of discourse rather than grammatically based features. Theories of pregrammatical and grammatical modes of processing and comprehension are discussed and used as an explanatory framework for understanding 4 fundamental coherence requirements. These are grounding, temporal coherence, spatial coherence, and thematic coherence. Data collected from Alzheimer's patients are used to illustrate how these types of coherence vary from earlier to later stages of the disease.

This article attempts to stabilize the concept of communicative meaning, responding to theorists who maintain that meaning has lost its moorings, that historical and linguistic forces disturb the idea of meaning so thoroughly it is impossible to achieve. In the first section, I argue that the assumption of semantic realism is necessary to any intellectual or disciplinary concept of communication. This section also distinguishes between meaning and significance: Meaning is a purposeful and constrained sharable message, and significance is the relationship of the message to other realms of importance. The second section outlines a coherentist epistemology for meaning by addressing issues in intelligibility, order, and verification. The final section contrasts a message perspective with a code perspective and explains how a theory of communication, not language, can use various considerations pragmatically (e.g., referential rules, intentionality, context) to bound meaning and keep it from slipping into incessant semiosis.

This paper describes a communication and cultural code approach to ethnonational conflicts. More specifically, it describes theory and research emerging from transformative communication events aimed at building constructive relationships betwetact necessitated by conflict. These are dialogue groups organized according to principles established by Allport's (1954) contact hypothesis including sustained contact, cooperative interdependence, and norms of equality. Secondly, we state the assumptions of an interactional approach to conflict, which assumes that conflict is, by definition, interactive making communication impossible to avoid. These assumptions also include an emphasis on the relational aspects of communication, and the fact that interaction sequences become patterned over time and become constitutive of the defining characteristics of the conflict. Moreover, the participants are influenced by communication codes, which are culturally based orientations to producing and interpreting interactions. These codes are grounded in the work of Katriel (1986), Carbaugh (1990), Ellis (1994, 1999) and Philipsen (1997) and have implications for the meaning potential of individuals in conflict situations. Finally, we explicate these issues by describing research that is representative of this communication approach to conflict. This research conceptualizes reconciliation‐aimed contacts and demonstrates how communication codes are modified by situational constraints.

This book examines instances of radical conflict in order to provide critical analyses of media and mediation implicated in such conflicts, often for ill but sometimes for good. Chapters offer ways of thinking intended to attenuate spirals of violence and move radical conflicts toward new means of discourse.