Int Maria you greeted 'Did you greet Maria' Sicilian, data from Cruschina 2007). A
structural approach would thus make the prediction that wh- interrogatives.
SOM E A G R A M M A T I C E V ID EN C E FOR A H I E R A R C H Y OF F UN CT ION AL P ROJE C T IONS Silvia Ma r t í n e z -F e r r e i r o, A u t o n omo us U niv e rsi ty of Barc elona A n na Gavar ró, A u t o n omous U n iv e rs i ty of Barc elo na Grodzinsky (1990) established the conditions which any theoretical grammar must meet: parsability, learnability and break-down compatibility. The first two of these conditions are actually foundational in the generative program, and the last one was explicitly introduced later; yet the evaluation of grammatical theories on the basis of learnibility and break-down compatibility remain more a desideratum than usual practise. In this paper we consider the hierarchy of functional projections as proposed by the cartographic approach (Belletti 2002, Rizzi 2004), against the evidence provided by agrammatic aphasia. We consider the agrammatic productions of fifteen patients affected of Broca’s aphasia, speakers of Catalan, Galician and Spanish (ages between 27 and 83, mean: 55, tested between 1 month and 11 years post-onset, all classified as mild agrammatics by standard clinical tests). In line with the work of Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) and Friedmann (2001), we assume that these speaker’s syntactic deficits stem from their inability to built the whole sentential structure (the Tree Pruning Hypothesis, TPH), while other grammatical principles and operations (merge, internal merge, and agree) are assumed to remain intact. A total of eight elicitation and repetition experiments have been run to test the production of (i) sentential negation, (ii) tense and subject agreement, (iii) clitic production, (iv) wh- question production, and (v) subject and object relative clauses. The results are summarised in Table and Graphic 1 and point indeed to a structural deficit in agrammatic production: subject-verb agreement and negation are significantly less impaired than all higher functional projections; tense is more impaired than clitics and all elements in the CP-field; wh-questions are maximally impaired in spite of the fact that wh- elements are well understood, as witnessed by a comprehension experiment carried out with the same subjects. While performance on the various functional projections significantly worsened the higher the functional projection was, and the differences are statistically significant, there is no statistically significant difference between the three languages examined. The results indicate that a structural approach to the production deficit of agrammatic aphasics is robust; however, some facts remain to be accounted for. Of those we concentrate on the production of wh- and yes/no questions that did not follow the expected pattern. Rizzi’s (2002) CP field instantiates the following categories: Force > Top > Int > Top > Focus > Mod > Top; wh- interrogatives are argued to be merged in the specifier of Focus (Rizzi 2001), except for why/pourquoi, which would be merged in a higher position, the specifier of Int (Rizzi 2001, 2006). Yes/no questions results from an overt or covert interrogative operator in Int (Chi a Maria salutasti? Int Maria you greeted ‘Did you greet Maria’ Sicilian, data from Cruschina 2007). A structural approach would thus make the prediction that wh- interrogatives would be less (or equally) impaired than yes/no questions and why questions. In the results for the three languages tested here, the prediction is not borne out: yes/no questions are less impaired in the three languages (71%, 51% and 80% correct answers for Catalan, Galician and Spanish respectively) than wh– questions (60%, 44% and 52% correct answers for Catalan, Galician and Spanish). Furthermore, there is a certain trade-off between yes/no questions and wh– questions, with yes/no questions being produced instead of wh–questions. In an error analysis of the results, we find that he Ibero-Romance counterparts of why are produced in yes/no questions as overt Interrogative markers. This last finding corroborates the findings of adult unimpaired grammar that single out why from other whelements. Regarding yes/no questions vs. wh– questions, we argue that our results cast doubt on the hierarchy proposed in Rizzi (2002) at least for Ibero-Romance. Further evidence from adult unimpaired Catalan and Spanish also indicate that non-interrogative Focus cannot cooccur with an overt interrogative;
we conclude that for Ibero-Romance only a subset of the categories in the universal hierarchy are available. Conflicting results in other languages (see Burchert et al. (2005) for German, where yes/no questions are more impaired than wh– questions) are then analysed as a consequence of cross-linguistic variation in the instantiation of functional categories. Agr
Negation Tense Clitics WHRelatives 8,5 4 17,6 40 40 27,2 12 14 15,2 53,85 55,38 54,4 10,67 20 27,33 30,77 46,69 32,8 Table 1: Percentage of errors (Catalan, Galician and Spanish collapsed) Production e rrors in Ibe ro-Rom a nce a gra m m a tism 100
80
60
40
20
0 Agr
Negati on
Tense Catal an
M od&Asp Gal i ci an
Cl i ti cs
WH-
Rel ati ves
Spani sh
Graphic 1: Production errors in Catalan, Galician and Spanish R e f e r e n c es Belletti, A. (ed.) (2002) Structures and Beyond: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 3, New York: Oxford University Press. Burchert, F., M. Swoboda-Moll and R. de Bleser (2005) ‘The left periphery in agrammatic clausal representations. Evidence from German’, Journal of Neurolinguistics 18: 67–88. Cruschina, S. (2007) ‘Marking yes/no questions’, CIDSM 2nd Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax Meeting, Cambridge. Friedmann, N. and Y. Grodzinsky (1997) ‘Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree’, Brain and Language 56: 397-425. Friedmann, N. (2001) ‘Agrammatism and the psychological reality of the syntactic tree’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 30 (1): 71-90. Rizzi, L (2001) ‘On the position ‘Int(errogative)’ in the left periphery of the clause’. In G. Cinque & G. Salvi (eds.) Current Studies in Italian Syntax Offered to Lorenzo Renzi, North Holland. Rizzi, L. (ed.) (2004) The structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2, New York: Oxford University Press. Rizzi, L. (2006) ‘On the form of chains: criterial positions and ECP effects’. In L. Cheng and N. Corver (eds.) Wh– Movement: Moving on, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
