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Abstract
Background: This study explored the relation between the production of determiners and case markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism. Determiners and case markers require case and therefore depend on the existence of case‐assigning constituents.
The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by a university grant for the encouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data, and to Roelien Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper.
Aims: Since verbs and verb inflections are case assigners, and are impaired in agrammatism, we tested whether the presence of verbs and verb inflection affects the production of determiners and case markers in Dutch and Hebrew agrammatism.
Methods & Procedures: A total of 11 Hebrew‐speaking and 8 Dutch‐speaking individuals with agrammatism participated in picture description and sentence elicitation tasks, and their spontaneous speech was analysed.
Outcomes & Results: The production of case‐related morphemes was closely connected to the presence of a case assigner in the sentence. In Hebrew, object case was produced correctly 98% of the time, and always when a transitive verb was present in the sentence. In Dutch the production of determiners on the subject was related to the presence of a finite verb. The production of complete object noun phrases related to the presence of a transitive verb.
Conclusions: The results indicate that case itself, as well as determiners and case markers, which depend on case, are not impaired in agrammatic production. The apparent deficit is rather tightly related to the deficit in verbs and verb inflection. This suggests that the production of determiners and pronouns should be treated within sentence context, in which a special emphasis should be given to the production of correctly inflected verbs.
Notes
The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by a university grant for the encouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data, and to Roelien Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper.
1. Note that we present a somewhat simplified overview of the theory on case covering only the most basic cases that are relevant for our study. A more detailed discussion would be beyond the scope of this paper.
2. Case can also be lexically specified, and then it is called inherent (or lexical) case. For the study of inherent case assignment, languages that show a clear distinction between inherent and structural case assignment, like German or Russian, are more interesting (see Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, Citation2002, and Ruigendijk, Citation2002, for a study of these languages). When we speak about case here, we always mean structural case.
3. But see, for instance, Landau (Citation2006) for an alternative analysis of case.
4. Case‐related morphemes can be bound or free. In Russian and Standard Arabic, for example, case is morphologically realised as a suffix on the noun, in German it is realised on the determiner. Note that although the presence of a determiner always requires case assignment to the noun phrase, determiners are not case‐marked in all languages. English and Dutch determiners, for example, are not specified for case.
5. There are different degrees of severity in agrammatism. The individuals who are impaired at the tense phrase (TP) level have tense impairment and no impairment in agreement. Those who are impaired above TP are not impaired in either tense or agreement (for a description of degrees of severity see Friedmann, Citation2001, Citation2005).
6. Under a checking account for tense inflection, the verb enters the tree randomly inflected and its inflection is checked in T. If the tense is correct, the derivation converges, but when the tense is incorrect, the derivation crashes. If checking in T is impossible, the verb can be produced with its random tense.
7. Mass nouns and plural count nouns do not need a determiner in languages like English and Dutch. According to Longobardi (Citation1994) these noun phrases should still be analysed as DPs (cf. Abney, Citation1987); that is, as complete noun phrases. De Roo (Citation1999) suggested the same for Dutch mass nouns and plural count nouns. We follow Longobardi and de Roo in our analysis and refer to their work for a technical discussion of this issue.
8. Specifically: According to the minimalist programme (Chomsky, Citation1995), the case of the subject and the object is checked in spec‐head configuration of the noun phrase (DP) and the case assigner. That is to say, the noun phrase is in the specifier position of the phrase, and the case assigner is at the head of the phrase. Subject DPs raise to spec‐TP to check their case against the verb and its tense, which are in T0 (following the movement of the verb from VP to T0). Objects check their case with the verb at AgroP according to Chomsky (Citation1995), or at the light v layer according to Chomsky (Citation2000, Citation2001). Note that although several different frameworks have been suggested for structural case, such as assignment of case with and without AgroP, the aspects that are relevant to our study remain the same: structural case is dependent on the relation between subject DP and finite V and the relation between object DP and a transitive V, and case for the object NP is assigned in a lower node of the tree.
9. In the government and binding framework (e.g., Chomsky, Citation1986), the noun was assumed to be the head of a noun phrase (NP), with the determiner in the specifier position. Abney (Citation1987) presented an alternative analysis, the DP analysis: D (the determiner) is a functional head that takes a noun phrase as its complement, forming a DP, determiner phrase.
10. We thank the reviewer for pointing out this important point to us.