Relevance of adverb distribution for the analysis of sentence representation in agrammatic patients.
In this study, it is shown that functional categories are present in agrammatic grammar. Specifically, the verb-adverb order is investigated in three agrammatic patients by means of a constituent ordering task. It is shown that when the verb is in a nonfinite form, it either precedes or follows the specifier-like adverb (both positions are correct), but when the verb is finite, the adverb always follows it (which is the only possible order). The conclusions are that (i) a functional category (namely Inflection), which is responsible for the relative order verb-adverb (of the relevant class), must exist in agrammatic grammar, and (ii) agrammatic aphasia cannot be described as a syntactic impairment involving basic sentence structure.
Lonzi
L
L
Department of Neurology, Università degli Studi, Milan, Italy.
Luzzatti
C
C
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement