4 - Chil and His Resources

Summary

A blood clot that formed in the left hemisphere of Chil’s brain left him with a three-word vocabulary: Yes, No, and And. Despite this he remained for the rest of his life a powerful actor and indeed speaker, someone who could not only engage in rapid face-to-face interaction, but also carry on conversations on the phone. Subsequent chapters will investigate in detail how this was possible. The current chapter describes his repertoire of resources, which included not only his impoverished vocabulary, but also rich prosody, gesture, the ability to understand what others were saying, and fluent timing. His success as a speaker despite an almost-complete inability to produce sentences, or indeed complex syntax of any kind, demonstrates the central importance of the construction of utterances and action through co-operative action investigated in earlier chapters. Simultaneously it calls into question the unproblematic identification of the category speaker with the ability of an individual (rather than a distributed multiparty system organized through co-operative action) to produce complex language structure. My practices for videotaping his daily life over a period of eight years are briefly described.

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