Davis BMaclagan M2018-07-232018-07-2320180378-2166http://hdl.handle.net/10092/15681In order to make a narrative more interesting, narrators often represent what the protagonists say in direct speech. There is a long tradition of analyzing direct speech in narrative in both linguistics and literary analysis, but it has only recently been studied in the discourse of people with cognitive impairments, predominantly aphasia (Cummings, 2016). We examine represented speech, also called reported speech or constructed dialogue, in eighty conversations with five white American women in their mid- to late eighties, as they are moving from mild to early moderate dementia. Our primary aim is to investigate how these women present autobiographical facets of their repertoires of identities through conversational interaction embellished with represented speech in narratives. We deduce their autobiographical details as we examine how they construct biographical fragments for other people who have been important in their lives. Such narratives appear to be shared to expand initial categorization, create common ground, establish relationships, handle impression management, and perhaps even maintain positive face.enCreative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives LicenseJournal Article2018-04-09Fields of Research::47 - Language, communication and culture::4704 - Linguistics::470405 - Discourse and pragmaticsField of Research::17 - Psychology and Cognitive Sciences::1702 - Cognitive Science::170204 - Linguistic Processes (incl. Speech Production and Comprehension)https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.03.023