This dissertation is a study of the comprehension of contrastive focus, clitic left dislocation and clitic constructions in Catalan agrammatism. These structures remain mostly unexplored in agrammatic literature, and present some relevant properties that make them suitable for evaluating current hypotheses on the deficit in agrammatic comprehension. Here I present new data from five experimental tasks –two truth-value judgement tasks and three sentence-picture matching tasks– designed to assess the interpretation of the referred structures by Broca’s aphasics. The findings from a preliminary discrimination task corroborate that agrammatics preserve their ability to distinguish the intonational contours characteristic of these constructions and, therefore, that the impairment in comprehension cannot be attributed to a misperception of prosodical patterns. The results from the comprehension tasks indicate that the agrammatics’ interpretation of declaratives, subject focalisations and topicalisations and clitics is preserved, whereas their performance on object topicalisations and focalisations is compromised. The results also show that the notions of movement and intervention are useful to explain the patterns of loss in agrammatic comprehension and, consequently, provide further support for accounts based on these notions, namely, the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis Grodzinsky (2000a) and the Feature-Underspecification Hypothesis Grillo (2008). For the purpose of testing these two hypotheses, I also examine the role of morphosyntactic features in the comprehension of the referred constructions to learn whether the deficit selectively affects only discourse-scope features, in line with the FUH’s predictions, or copies, as hypothesised by the TDH. A mismatch between relevant features that function as attractors of movement is expected to prevent minimality effects from occurring in object-derived structures under the FUH. The finding that a mismatch of number between the displaced object and the subject does not improve the aphasics’ performance on focalisations and topicalisations shows that agrammatic aphasics cannot use morphosyntactic features to establish syntactic chains, thus strengthening the TDH’s assumption that copies are deleted from aphasics’ representations. Finally, the experimental data reported in this dissertation also provide further evidence in favour of the derivational analysis of clitic left dislocation (López, 2009; Rubio, 2014).
The agrammatic comprehension of contrastive focus and clitic left dislocation in catalan
Salmons Llussà, I. (Author). 4 Dec 2015
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis