A Discourse Study of Chinese Dementia Patients under the Affect Resource Perspective Valve

Abstract

Based on a case study approach, this study explores the individualized differences in the use of affect resource between Chinese patients with Alzheimer’s disease and normal senior in conversation, using the daily conversations of the two subjects as the data, and manually annotating them with the UMA corpus Tools. It was found that the Alzheimer’s patient produced fewer attitude resource compared to the normal senior. In addition, the Alzheimer’s patient and the normal senior both used “unbiased/ biased” character-group of affect resource more, and the Alzheimer’s patient tended to use “Bu”(means ‘No’ in English) plus characters (an adjective modifi er/a verb) express the affect degree of inclination, which could extend further research for the field of applied linguistics.