Neurolinguistics
Explain the role of the right hemisphere with regards to pragmatic functions. Remember that this is an essay for a module in Neurolinguistics. Therefore, the focus has to be on the linguistic aspect, anything that is related to language (ignore things like difficulty in understanding people’s facial expressions or changes in behaviour due to right hemisphere damage). You only have to analyse the effects on different aspects of language such as
– Speech acts (a threat, joke, promise).
• Register (may be overly informal).
• Initiating, terminating, turn-taking in
conversational exchanges.
• Providing sufficient information for
communicative intention (relevance).
• Adequate or appropriate prosody/tone.
• Coherence of discourse topic, maintenance and
