Linguistic theory and aphasia: an overview

ABSTRACT

Background: Aphasia research has been informed by linguistic theory to a great extent. Conversely, linguistic theory has also been informed by data from people with aphasia, albeit to a lesser extent.

Aims: This overview to the Special Issue of Aphasiology entitled “Aphasia and linguistic theory: What we have captured so far” presents a narrative review that aims to illustrate the contribution of linguistic theory to aphasia research, and also includes a section that presents the articles making up the special issue. The narrative review, which is not exhaustive, highlights influential theoretical frameworks and linguistic constructs that have been central to accounts of language impairment in aphasia.

Main Contribution: The overview illustrates the contribution of linguistic theory to aphasiology and paves the way for the development of a unified approach to aphasia, which will incorporate insights not only from theoretical linguistics, but also from other complementary fields, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive (neuro)psychology, and neuroscience of language.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• linguistic theory
• syntax
• generative grammar
• usage-based approaches

Acknowledgments

We thank all the authors and reviewers for their contributions. We are grateful to Chris Code for the opportunity he gave Maria Garraffa to serve as editor of this special issue, and for valuable suggestions and comments that helped us improve the quality of the Editorial.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. List of abbreviations: CP = Complementiser Phrase; DMH = Distributed Morphology Hypothesis; DOP-H = Derived Order Problem Hypothesis; DP = Determiner Phrase; IFIH = Interpretable Features’ Impairment Hypothesis; NP = Noun Phrase; OSV = Object-Subject-Verb; OVS = Object-Verb-Subject; PADILIH = Past Discourse Linking Hypothesis; PWA = persons with aphasia; RM = Relativised Minimality; SI = Special Issue; SOV = Subject-Object-Verb; SVO = Subject-Verb-Object; T/INFL = Tense/Inflection; TBI = Traumatic Brain Injury; TDH = Trace Deletion Hypothesis; TPH = Tree Pruning Hypothesis; TUF = Treatment of Underlying Forms; TUH = Tense Underspecification Hypothesis.

2. Note that, unlike DOP-H, the TDH (Grodzinsky, 1986, 1990, 1995) predicts only sentences with movement of maximal projections to be affected.

3. Merge is a “class of highly constrained structure-building operations”, which create “phrasal nodes (NP = noun phrase, VP = verb phrase, PP = prepositional phrase) out of merged categories (DETerminer, Noun, Verb, Preposition), which are in turn merged into a ‘root’, sentence node” (Grodzinsky & Friederici, 2006, p. 242).

4. Interpretable features are relevant for semantic interpretation, whereas uninterpretable features are not. For instance, in sentences like Everyday John drinks a beer, the person and number features of the subject (John) are copied from the subject to the verb (drinks). The marking of these features on the verb is uninterpretable because it is “redundant” and, therefore, does not contribute to the interpretation of the sentence. In contrast, in sentences like I went to the movies, the tense feature +PAST that the verb (went) bears is interpretable, as it clearly contributes to the interpretation of the sentence (i.e., the action “going to the movies” took place before the speaking time).

5. For example, “interpretable categories” such as Tense require relating the speaking time to the event time (processing of extralinguistic information), encoding an abstract prephonological tense/time reference value such as +PAST (processing of grammatical knowledge), and retrieving the corresponding verb form (e.g., walked) or the corresponding inflectional morpheme (i.e., -ed) (processing of grammatical knowledge).

6. Note that Fyndanis et al.’s (2012), Varlokosta et al.’s (2006), and Nanousi et al.’s (2006) studies adopted the view that, in both null-subject and non-null-subject languages (e.g., Greek and English, respectively), subject-verb Agreement is a local feature copying operation from the grammatical subject to the verb (e.g., Chomsky, 1995, Chomsky, 2000, 2001; Spyropoulos & Revithiadou, 2009; but for different views, see Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou, 1998; Philippaki-Warburton, 1987; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007).

7. MOVE_XP is the syntactic operation by which a maximal projection such as DP, verb phrase or prepositional phrase is moved out of a position X to a position Y and establishes a link to the trace it leaves behind.

8. MOVE_V is the syntactic operation by which a verb is moved out of a position X to a position Y and establishes a link to the trace it leaves behind.

9. BIND is a “relationship that determines how reflexives and pronouns link to other NPs, on which they depend for reference, in the same sentence” (Grodzinsky & Friederici, 2006, p. 242) (e.g., Mary looked at herself; John asked Mary to help him).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme [project number 223265] and FRIPRO funding scheme [project number 287745].