Brain damage can cause speech and language disorders such as aphasia, apraxia of speech and dysarthria.
A pragmatic language disorder/disability is also often seen after brain injury. The person who suffers this does not have to have aphasia.
Pragmatic means: focused on facts, responding to practice, businesslike. Pragmatic language use is about what someone wants to achieve with a sentence. What do you actually want to say? What is the underlying communicative value of a message?

Examples of pragmatic problems with brain injury

• not taking others into account enough during a conversation
  
• only responding to key words
  
• taking statements too literally, which leads to misunderstandings
  
• jumping from one topic to another
  
• talking too much
  
• not distinguishing who you are talking to
  
• repeating, as in persevering
  
• using language too precisely
  
• talking to oneself
  
• difficulty starting a conversation
• word-finding problems officially fall under semantic disorders but a practical (pragmatic) problem arises. People often use:
  
  • short sentences
  • grammatically incorrect sentences

This disrupts the story structure. Communication can become difficult and then a pragmatic problem arises.

Pragmatics is the ability to adapt language structure to:

• the conversation partner
  
• the context
  
• the situation