On the Social Nature of Communicative Impairments: Interactional Making of Communicative (In)competence

Abstract

Difficulties in social functioning or adaptation are distinguished in the special literature as definitional characteristics of intellectual disability. These difficulties
affect not only abilities to earn and spend money, find and keep a job or get married but communication as well. The communicative problems of people with intellectual disabilities are diverse. They include problems with speech etiquette, understanding of humour, conveying and understanding of implicit meanings (irony, metaphors, indirectness, etc.). In general, these difficulties can be characterized as lack of communicative competence. Professionals working with people with disabilities in medical, educational, social institutions usually consider this lack to be a consequence of the intellectual or mental defects of an individual. However, from the perspective of conversation analysis, which is taken in the present article, lack of communicative competence can be described as an emergent interactional phenomenon. In the article I examine an episode from a class in a day-care centre for young adults with impairments. In this episode one of the participants with impairments tells a joke and his telling appears to fail for the audience. At first glance this may seem to appear to be caused by the teller’s actions (choice of joke, manner of performance) solely, and in turn as a consequence of his impairments. However, my analysis demonstrates that this failure is created by several participants in the course of the interaction. On the one hand, the emergence and choice of the joke is initiated by teller’s coparticipants. On the other hand, their subsequent actions construct the situation as pedagogical (testing their partner’s skills) rather than spontaneous and evaluate.
the joke as not funny.