Impoverishment of Grammatical Features in a Non-fluent Aphasic Speaker: The Grammatical Nature of Minimal Structures

An important development in linguistic models is the shift from construction-oriented rules to elementary computations that generate complex grammatical expressions. In this monograph we presents a systematic linguistic examination of an Italian aphasic speaker focusing on locality conditions as configurational restrictions on syntactic computations and on functional elements as fundamental triggers for computational processes. The explanatory framework we adopt considers the grammar to be an integral part of language processing; it is a derivational model compatible with well-known parsing strategies such as the minimal link condition and the minimal chain principle. This approach to aphasia supports the hypothesis that linguistic deficit is an impoverishment of procedural capacities that manifests itself in reduced syntactic structures. This book is recommended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, as well as medical researchers and speech therapists interested in the same fields. It can be adopted as principal text for the specific domain (Syntax and aphasia).