coherence & propositions: measuring reference distance in :schizophrenia: threads
info
Hausarbeit im Seminar: Sprache und Psychose (PHILGEIST_S_16827_25S)
Dozent: Anatol Stefanowitsch
abgegeben von: placeholder
MtrNr: placeholder
abgegeben am: 2025-10-18
an: Freie Universität Berlin
abstract
In this paper we want to explore reference marking and coherence in schizophrenia language by measuring corpus distance of similar nouns preceded by specified determinants.
Inspired by Zimmerer et al. (2017) we are interested in observations concerning coherence and propositional statement conditions in schizophrenia language. Further @nenchev_linguistic_2024 consider investigating in coherence as important “linguistic aspect in psychotic language addressing the relatedness between word chunks or sentences” an approach to “capture formal thought disorders (disorganisation, tangentiality, derailment and poverty of speech) in schizophrenia” (cf. Nenchev (2024) 2.1: linguistic markers of schizophrenia). As this is not a clinical but a corpus linguistics study we do not intend to concur with recent psychiatric literature but rather take the subject as welcome task to test corpus linguistics methods.
Since above mentioned linguistic marker seems to play a crucial role within target group language features (and as such can be seen as asset of thinking- or world building capacity which might deviate from standard within the range of negative symptoms) we might with our approach add to the research done concerning frequency based analyses of how typical patients language might appear and how it deviates in terms of keywords or word fields. Our interest is more dedicated to the structural layer of the language which can not be described by raw frequencies. In our opionion disturbances on that layer might be hidden and not to grasp easily such that a listener would not always be able to precisely figure out what the disturbing factor is. Missing coherence, which we will investigate, may be a too narrow explanation to many impressions that schizophrene language leaves the listener with. But it seems to be a good starting point to unveiling structural patterns of patients language.