Abstract for Philip Rausch's talk

Tapping into syntactic domains in agrammatism: The interpretation of (non-)canonical structures within CP and DP
Philip Rausch (University of Potsdam)
October 25, 2007 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - 6:00 PM; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

The aim of the current study was to assess the comprehension of canonical (agent-patient) and non-canonical (patient-agent) structures within full sentences (CPs) and determiner phrases (DPs) by German speaking aphasic participants with agrammatism. Many agrammatic patients exhibit a selective deficit in the comprehension of non-canonical structures, such as passives and object relative clauses.

We made use of a particularly strong case of theoretical parallelism to test predictions made by current theories of agrammatism: the DP-hypothesis. During the last 20 years (starting with Abney 1987), syntactic theory has increasingly assimilated the functional structure projected by nouns to the one found in full sentences, resulting in largely parallel architectures of the verbal and nominal syntax domains. Also -- as Chomsky's (1970) famous sentence pair in (1) illustrates -- it is widely assumed that movement processes may take place within DP, resulting in passive-like structures within the nominal domain (cf. (1b)):

(1) a) The enemy's destruction of the city.
b) The city's destruction by the enemy.

We tested the German equivalents of canonical (1a) and the non-canonical nominal 'passive' (1b) against their verbal active and passive counterparts as well as canonical subject and non-canonical object relative clauses with a group of agrammatic subjects. So far, results generally show that the deficit in the comprehension of non-canonical structures runs largely parallel in CP and DP. In many cases, this canonical/non-canonical divide breaks down in the case of relative clauses, however. We discuss the patterns found in light of current theories of the agrammatic comprehension deficit (e.g., Grodzinsky's (2006) Trace Deletion Hypothesis).

References
Abney, S. (1987). The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. PhD dissertation, MIT.

Chomsky, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In R. Jacobs & P. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar. Waltham: Blaisdell.

Grodzinsky, Y. (2006). A blueprint for a brain map of syntax. In Y. Grodzinsky & K. Amunts (Eds.), Broca's Region. New York: Oxford University Press.