Time reference and tense marking in Greek agrammatism: evidence from narratives and a sentence production priming task

ABSTRACT

Background

Cross-linguistic studies on time reference in highly inflected languages have shown that tense inflection is particularly vulnerable in agrammatic speakers. According to the PAstDIscourseLInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), an asymmetry is predicted between past and non-past forms, due to the extra discourse linkage the former type imposes.

Aims

The present paper investigates whether Greek agrammatic speakers are able to correctly use tense markers with respect to the relevant reference point, analyzing data from three different production tasks to understand how performance is modulated by different methodologies.

Methods & Procedures

seven agrammatic speakers and a control group participated in three experimental tasks (a) an elicited picture description, (b) a semi-standardized interview and (c) a sentence production priming task.

Outcomes & Results

Different outcomes were elicited across different tasks. Agrammatic speakers tended to accurately use past tense forms when they could freely select the content of their narration, as in the case of the two narrative tasks (the elicited picture description, and the semi-standardized interview). However, the same participants experienced significant difficulties referring to past and future events when using a sentence production priming task. Consequently, the predictions of PADILIH are not fully supported by the Greek data, given that, in addition to past tense deficits, the future tense was also severely compromised.

Conclusions

Our data clearly suggest that language performance is affected by the processing demands placed on the patient’s linguistic system by the experimental task used. Moreover, future tense deficits in Greek are interpreted as difficulties in the processing of conversational implicatures.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrammatism
• time reference
• past tense
• future
• Greek
• task effects

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all participants of the present study, to Sofia Apostolopoulou for her assistance on data collection, and to two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments that helped us improve the quality of the paper. An earlier version of this work has been presented at the 17^th Science of Aphasia conference, 25–30 September, 2016, Venice, Italy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This idea was first introduced by Partee (1973), who put forward a pronominal/referential theory of temporal anaphora, where tense is treated as a temporal pronoun (see also subsequent work of Abusch, 1997; Heim, 1994; Kratzer, 1998). Temporal features are interpreted as identity functions that entail presuppositions on the possible values of the temporal pronoun to which they are adjoined (located before or after the utterance time).

2. Lapointe (1985) used a markedness hierarchy built on semantic grounds to distinguish among tenses, suggesting that past tense are harder than present tense forms (past tense (V+ ed) > third-person singular present tense (V + s) > present progressive tense (V+ ing) > verb stems (V)).

3. From a theoretical point of view, future tense is considered problematic, given that there is no straightforward relation between future tense and futurity (Comrie, 1985; Dahl & Velupillai, 2008; de Brabanter, Kissine, & Sharifzadeh, 2014).

4. Similarly for English, Comrie (1985) argues that the presence of the auxiliary will is not a sufficient condition for future-time reference. Huddleston and Pullum (2002) treat will not as a tense marker but as a modal.

5. The particle na has been analyzed in Greek as a subjunctive marker (Philippaki-Warburton & Veloudis, 1984), as a modality marker (Tsimpli, 1990), and as a complementizer (Agouraki, 1991). More recently, Fiotaki (2014) analyzed na as a complementizer that introduces main and subordinated clauses expressing different modalities.