Measuring Some Semantic and Pragmatic Variables in the Speech of Two Psychiatric Patients

This is a report of research in progress to develop methods for studying semantic structures underlying the speech of patients in psychotherapy. It uses the notion of case relations as markers of semantic functions to describe underlying semantic representations. In particular, semantic representations are related to personality differences between two patients in classic psychoanalysis. Significant differences are found in the frequency distributions of some semantic functions, especially Beneficiary and Bearer, in the distributions of semantic functions by topic of discourse, and in the correlations of semantic functions with each other.