CURRENT ACTIVITIES (as of September 2008)

I'm finishing up my book Doing Cross-Disciplinary Discourse Analysis (under contract with Oxford University Press). I plan to pilot this book in my Spring 2008 graduate course LING 581/781 "Cross-disciplinary discourse analysis" and submit the manuscript to OUP in summer 2008.

I'm also working on a new project called "At the Intersection of Art, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Discourse: Talk in Response to Paintings."

ABSTRACT: Proponents of innovative programming at the intersection of Alzheimer’s disease and the arts claim that these multi-sensory experiences that focus on personhood are especially good at promoting the social and creative wellbeing of individuals with this disease.  Because language is an observable representation of mental activity, rigorous linguistic analyses would arguably provide powerful evidence of the cognitive and social effects of such programs on participants.  To my knowledge, however, no linguist has yet studied the discourse produced within such artistic endeavors.  In this study, I examine the language of descriptions, evaluations, and personal experience narratives produced by sixteen individuals (half at an early stage and half at a more advanced stage) in response to paintings and sculptures as part of six weekly video-recorded small group tours at the National Gallery of Australia.  I am hopeful that the findings of this study will illuminate contextual features of the complex relationship between language and Alzheimer’s disease while simultaneously providing an important step toward improving the everyday lives of people living with this disease.

PUBLICATION UPDATE

The following articles have been published very recently:

Hamilton,  Heidi E.   2008.   Narrative as snapshot:  Glimpses of the past in Alzheimer talk.  Narrative Inquiry  18: 53-82.                                                                                      

Hamilton, Heidi, Gordon, Cynthia, Nelson, Meaghan, Martin, Paul, and Cotler, Scott. 2008.  “’We’re talking about cure”: How physicians describe outcomes to HCV therapy.  Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 42: 419-424.             

The following articles will appear soon:

Hamilton, Heidi E.  to appear.  Language and dementia: sociolinguistic aspects. In: C. L. J. de Bot (ed.), Language and the Brain, vol. 28 of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL), Cambridge University Press.

Hamilton, Heidi E and Bartell, Ashley. to appear. Peering inside the black box:  Lay and professional reasoning surrounding patient claims of adverse drug effects. In: Chris Candlin and Srikant Sarangi (eds.), Communication in the Professions, vol. 3 of Handbooks of Applied Linguistics. Berlin:  Mouton de Gruyter.

One article is nearing submission:

Hamilton, Heidi, McFadden, Jennifer, Crane, Cori, and Cohen, Andrew.  to be submitted.  Learning to use two-way, spatial prepositions in German: A developmental study of L2 teenagers in a summer language immersion program.