case in dutch and hebrew aphasiology v2 compact
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In press in Aphasiology
On the relation between Structural Case, determiners, and verbs in
agrammatism: A Study of Hebrew and Dutch
Esther Ruigendijka & Naama Friedmannb♥
a Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany; b Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Background & Aims: This study explored the relation between the production of determiners and case-markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism. Determiners and case-markers require case and therefore depend on the existence of case-assigning constituents. Since verbs and verb inflections are case-assigners, and are impaired in agrammatism, we tested whether the presence of verbs and verb inflection affects the production of determiners and case-markers in Dutch and Hebrew agrammatism.
Methods & Procedures: Eleven Hebrew-speaking and eight Dutch-speaking individuals with agrammatism participated in picture description and sentence elicitation tasks, and their spontaneous speech was analyzed.
Outcomes & Results: The production of case-related morphemes was closely connected to the presence of a case assigner in the sentence. In Hebrew, object case was produced correctly 98% of the time, and always when a transitive verb was present in the sentence. In Dutch the production of determiners on the subject was related to the presence of a finite verb. The production of complete object noun phrases related to the presence of a transitive verb.
Conclusions: The results indicate that case itself, as well as determiners and case markers, which depend on case, are not impaired in agrammatic production. The apparent deficit is rather tightly related to the deficit in verbs and verb inflection. This suggests that the production of determiners and pronouns should be treated within sentence context, in which a special emphasis should be given to the production of correctly inflected verbs.
Individuals with agrammatic aphasia encounter difficulties in the production of grammatical
morphemes such as determiners, case markers, and verb inflection, and their sentences many
times lack verbs. Recent studies show that not all grammatical morphemes are equally
susceptible to impairment and that the pattern of omission and substitution is determined by
linguistic constraints (De Bleser & Luzzatti, 1994; Friedmann, 1994, 2001, 2006; Grodzinsky,
1990; Hagiwara, 1995; Ruigendijk, van Zonneveld, & Bastiaanse, 1999). In this study we
explore the relations among the impaired morphemes, specifically the relation between the
production of determiners, pronouns, and case markers on the one hand, and verbs and verb
inflections on the other.
♥ The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by the university grant for the encouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data and to Roelien Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Address correspondence to Esther Ruigendijk, esther.ruigendijk@uni-oldenburg.de or to Naama Friedmann, naamafr@post.tau.ac.il.
Case in agrammatic production 2
Agrammatic speakers omit and substitute determiners, and produce only a small number of
pronouns in their free speech (see e.g. Menn & Obler, 1990; Nespoulous et al., 1988; Ruigendijk
& Bastiaanse, 2002; Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 1989). Linguistically, pronouns and noun
phrases with determiners have something in common: both need case, a syntactic mechanism
that marks syntactic roles such as subject and object in the sentence (for a detailed explanation of
case see section “What is case”). The main question we asked in this study was whether
grammatical case is impaired in agrammatism, or whether what seems to be impairment in case,
manifesting in omissions of case markers and determiners for example, should actually be
ascribed to a deficit in another component of syntactic ability that influences case.
Specifically, we examine a hypothesis that case in itself is not impaired in agrammatism.
The impaired production of morphemes related to case, such as case markers, determiners, and
pronouns in agrammatism is related to a deficit in the production of verb and verb inflection,
which assign case. In order to describe the syntactic requirements for case assignment, the next
sections present a brief linguistic background regarding case in general, case in agrammatism
and case in Hebrew and Dutch in particular, after which we describe the experimental
investigation and the results.
Linguistic Background - What is case? Case is a mechanism that specifies the syntactic relationship between, for example, a verb and
the subject and object. It marks the function of each noun phrase in the sentence. The subject
receives nominative case, and the object usually receives accusative case1. Since the Government
and Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986), it is assumed that every pronounced noun phrase
must have (exactly one) case. This requirement is called the Case Filter. A sentence with a noun
phrase that has not been assigned case is thus ungrammatical. For example, a sentence like “*I
am proud my students” (Chomsky, 1995, p. 113) is ungrammatical because my students does not
receive case.
According to Chomsky (1981, 1986), all languages have case. In some languages, like Russian
and Hungarian, case is overtly realized on nouns and pronouns. In some other languages, such as
Chinese, case is invisible. In other languages, it is sometimes realized morphologically while at
other times it remains invisible, as in the languages under discussion in this study: Hebrew and
1 Note that we present a somewhat simplified overview of the theory on case covering only the most basic cases that are relevant for our study, a more detailed discussion would be beyond the scope of this paper.
Case in agrammatic production 3
Dutch. Even when case is invisible, it is assumed to be there on an abstract level. When we use
the term case in this study, we refer to this syntactic notion of abstract case that is present in all
languages. The assignment of case to the subject and the object, which is the topic of the current
study, is dependent on the structural position of these noun phrases in relation to the verb and the
inflection and is therefore called structural (or syntactic) case (Chomsky, 1981).2,3
Noun phrases get their case from a case assigner. Nominative case is assigned to a noun
phrase in subject position by verb inflection, accusative is assigned by the verb to its object. This
study thus explored these case assigners – verbs and verb inflection. Verbs and verb inflection
play a major part in the agrammatic deficit, as illustrated in the introduction, and we surmised
that the deficit in determiners and pronouns might be related to the deficit in verb production.
In a simple subject-verb-object sentence, such as (1a), the modal ‘will’ (or, in other
sentences, the inflection of the verb) assigns nominative case to the subject noun phrase ‘the
man’. The transitive verb ‘meet’ assigns accusative case to the object ‘the boy’. In this example
in English, abstract case is assigned to the noun phrases, but it is not visible. Case becomes
visible in English when pronouns are used. As seen in (1b), the subject ‘he’ has nominative case,
whereas the object ‘him’ has accusative case.
(1) a. The man will meet the boy.
NOM ACC b. He will meet him.
Thus, subjects depend on the presence of the finite inflection of a verb, whereas objects
depend on the presence of a transitive verb. Subjects will not receive case if there is no finite
verb, and objects will not receive case if there is no transitive verb (for objects the verb does not
need to be finite). When the subject or the object do not receive case, the Case Filter will be
violated. One constraint on the Case Filter was suggested by Ouhalla (1993). According to
Ouhalla, the Case Filter applies only to complete noun phrases such as nouns with a determiner
and pronouns. Importantly for the current study, noun phrases without a determiner can be
caseless.
2 Case can also be lexically specified, and then it is called inherent (or lexical) case. For the study of inherent case assignment, languages that show a clear distinction between inherent and structural case assignment, like German or Russian are more interesting (see Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002, and Ruigendijk, 2002 for a study of these languages). When we speak about case here, we always mean structural case. 3 But see for instance Landau (2006) for an alternative analysis of case.
Case in agrammatic production 4
Case in agrammatism Several empirical investigations of the production of case-related morphemes4 in agrammatism
have yielded an unclear pattern of results. Some indicate the preservation of the production of
case-related morphemes (De Bleser, Bayer, & Luzzatti, 1996; Jarema & Kadzielawa, 1990;
Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002), while others report a deficit in case-related morphemes,
manifested in the overuse of the default form (which is nominative in the languages that were
examined, i.e., Russian and Serbo-Croatian, see Luria, 1976, and Zei & Šikić, 1990). The aim of
the current study is to assess the conditions in which case is impaired in agrammatism.
One suggestion for the description of the syntactic deficit in agrammatism is the Tree
Pruning Hypothesis (TPH, Friedmann, 2001, 2002, 2006; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997).
According to the TPH, the deficit of individuals with agrammatism is related to the projection of
the syntactic tree up to its highest nodes. This results in impaired production of structures and
grammatical morphemes that involve high nodes, whereas structures that involve only low nodes
remain intact. Crucially for the current study, tense inflection of the verb, which is associated
with the high part of the tree, is impaired in the speech production of many agrammatic
speakers5, when the verb cannot move to high nodes to get tense inflection. As a result, the verb
is often produced either in a nonfinite form rather than a finite form, as is the case in Germanic
languages, and in a low node, namely in sentence final position (Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998;
Kolk & Heeschen, 1992; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002) or it is produced in the wrong tense
inflection, as in other languages such as Hebrew and Arabic (Friedmann, 2000, 2001, 2006).6
Frequent verb omissions are also explained in this framework. Individuals with agrammatism
produce fewer verbs than non-brain-damaged speakers (Luzzatti et al., 2002; Saffran et al.,
1989). This was found to be closely related to the position of the verb on the syntactic tree, as
more verbs are omitted when the verb should have been produced in a high node (Bastiaanse &
van Zonneveld, 1998; Friedmann, 2000, 2006; Friedmann & Gil, 2001; Friedmann, Gvion,
4 Case-related morphemes can be bound or free. In Russian and Standard Arabic, for example, case is morphologically realized as a suffix on the noun, in German it is realized on the determiner. Note that although the presence of a determiner always requires case assignment to the noun phrase, determiners are not case-marked in all languages. English and Dutch determiners, for example, are not specified for case. 5 There are different degrees of severity in agrammatism. The individuals who are impaired at the Tense Phrase (TP) level have tense impairment and no impairment in agreement. Those who are impaired above TP are not impaired in either tense or agreement (for a description of degrees of severity see Friedmann, 2001, 2005). 6 Under a checking account for tense inflection, the verb enters the tree randomly inflected and its inflection is checked in T. If the tense is correct, the derivation converges, but when tense is incorrect, the derivation crashes. If checking in T is impossible, the verb can be produce with its random tense.
Case in agrammatic production 5
Biran, & Novogrodsky, 2006). So when verbs have to move to pruned nodes on the syntactic
tree, they either do not move and then appear with the wrong tense inflection and in a different
sentential position, or, alternatively, they get omitted. In the current study we explore the
possibility that the deficit in tense inflection and the omission of verbs cause a deficit in syntactic
case, because tense inflection and verbs are necessary to assign case. Specifically, we will
examine the realization of nominative case, the case of the subject, which is assigned by the verb
inflection, and of accusative case, the case usually assigned by the verb to its object.
Importantly, there is an additional side to this generalization. Given that according to the
TPH only structures that involve the high nodes are impaired in agrammatism, case that is
assigned (or checked) in low nodes should be intact. Because object case is assigned in low
nodes, it is not expected to be impaired under the TPH assumptions, that is, when the case-
assigning verb has been realized.
Given these considerations, we suggest the Preserved Case Hypothesis, which we will
examine in the present study.
The Preserved Case Hypothesis
Morphemes that depend on case and case assignment are not directly impaired in
agrammatism. Impaired production of case and case-related elements in a sentence is a
by-product of an impairment in related syntactic domains.
Recent results from Dutch and German agrammatism support this hypothesis. Ruigendijk et
al. (1999) demonstrated that the production of determiners and pronouns in Dutch and German
was related to the production of a case assigner, such as a (finite) verb or a preposition.
Individuals with agrammatism could produce determiners and pronouns in spontaneous speech
when a case assigner was realized; when no case assigner was present, they tended to omit
determiners or produced determiners and pronouns in the default nominative case. Similar results
were found for German-speakers with agrammatism in spontaneous speech as well as in several
production tasks (Ruigendijk, 2002; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2000, 2002).
Case in agrammatic production 6
Case in Hebrew and Dutch and specific predictions On Hebrew
In Hebrew, case is visible on definite object noun phrases and on pronouns. Nominative case
is not marked overtly. Accusative case on objects is marked with the free morpheme et, which
appears before the object. Only definite noun phrases can occur with the accusative marker
(Berman, 1978; Danon, 2001, 2006; Shlonsky, 1997), as shown on the examples in (2) and (3).
Definite noun phrases are either marked with the definite article ha- (2a), with bound possession
marking (2b), as a part of a Construct State Nominal in which the complement of the head noun
is definite (2c), or as a proper name (2d), and also before the demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’
(2e) (examples 2a-e are grammatical and are taken from the speech of participants in this study).
(2) a. ha-yeled xipes et ha-kadur
the-child searched ACC the-ball
‘The child looked for the ball’
b. hikarti et kol-ex
recognized-1st.sg.past ACC voice-your
‘I recognized your voice’
c. Yakov shama et ne’um rosh ha-memshala
Jacob heard ACC speech-head-the-government
‘Jacob heard the prime minister’s speech’
d. gvina cehuba mazkira li et holand
cheese yellow reminds to-me ACC Netherlands
‘Yellow cheese reminds me of the Netherlands’
e. eifo macat et ze?
where found-2nd.sg.fem.past ACC this?
‘Where did you find it?”
With indefinite objects, the accusative marker is not allowed in Hebrew, and according to
Danon (2006), indefinite objects in Hebrew lack case altogether. Therefore a sentence that
contains an indefinite object is grammatical without a case marker (3a) and is ungrammatical
with an accusative marker (3b).
Case in agrammatic production 7
(3) a. Ha-yeled xipes kadur
the-child searched ball
b. * Ha-yeled xipes et kadur
the-child searched ACC ball
On Dutch
In Dutch as in English, case is visible on pronouns only (e.g. ik vs. mij ‘I vs. me’ or hij vs.
hem ‘he vs. him’). Determiners are not marked for case, only for number and gender. All
singular count nouns obligatorily take a determiner (and therefore 4a is grammatical but 4b is
not), except for mass nouns and plural count nouns, which do not require a determiner (see 4c,
4d), and incorporate nouns, which must occur without a determiner (4e).
(4) a. Ik kocht een broodje kaas
I bought a roll cheese
‘I bought a cheese roll’
b. * Ik drink graag glaasje wijn
I drink gladly glass wine
‘I like to drink glass of wine’
c. Ik vind (deze) kaas erg lekker
I think (this) cheese very nice
‘I like (this) cheese very much’
d. Ik vind (deze) broodjes kaas lekker
I think (these) rolls cheese nice
‘I like (these) cheese rolls’
e. De jongen houdt van auto rijden
The boy likes car driving
‘The boy likes car driving’
Although Dutch determiners are not marked for case, it is assumed that their realization
depends on having case, and thus, on the presence of a case assigner (following Ouhalla, 1993).
Case in agrammatic production 8
According to the Preserved Case Hypothesis, it is expected that agrammatic speakers will be
able to produce case-dependent morphemes such as case markers and determiners as long as they
have the proper syntactic preconditions. Given these properties of case assignment in Hebrew
and Dutch, for Hebrew this means that if a transitive verb is produced, and the object is definite,
an accusative case marker should appear. For Dutch this means that if a finite verb is present,
complete subject noun phrases can be realized, and if a transitive verb is present, complete object
noun phrases can appear. Notice that the tree pruning hypothesis does not mean that individuals
with agrammatism can never access high nodes, it does, however, predict frequent failure in verb
movement. The exact expectation is thus that when there is no case assigner there will be more
omissions than when a case assigner (a verb or verb inflection) exists.
Testing two structurally different languages like Hebrew and Dutch thus allowed us to test
different aspects of our hypothesis. In Hebrew, where definite articles are not obligatory, but
where an overt accusative marker for definite objects exists, we tested the relationship between
the presence of a transitive verb for definite objects and the accusative marker. We expected that,
if the presence of a case assigner is a critical factor, definite objects should appear more often
with than without accusative marker in the presence of a transitive verb. In Dutch, we tested the
production of complete noun phrases. We investigated the relationship between the presence of a
nominative case assigning finite verb and completeness of the subject noun phrase, and between
an accusative case assigning transitive verb and completeness of the object noun phrase. If
indeed the presence of a case assigner is a critical factor in the production of a complete noun
phrase, we expect a higher rate of complete-to-incomplete noun phrases when a case assigner is
present than when a case assigner is not present.
Experimental investigation Case in Hebrew
Participants
Eleven Hebrew-speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia participated in the Hebrew part of
the study. They all had non-fluent aphasia, diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia with agrammatism by
the neuropsychological batteries used in Israeli rehabilitation centers – the Hebrew versions of
the WAB (Kertesz, 1982; Hebrew version by Soroker, 1997) the PALPA (Kay, Lesser, &
Coltheart, 1992; Hebrew version by Gil & Edelstein, 2001), and the BAFLA battery for
assessment of syntactic abilities (Friedmann, 1998), and by clinical workup. All participants had
Case in agrammatic production 9
a lesion in the left cerebral hemisphere and were right-handed. Their mean age was 39;6 (SD =
17.1), and mean years of education 12;5. All patients had characteristic agrammatic speech: non-
fluent and short with incomplete utterances, reduction of sentence structure and tense inflection
errors. They produced very few, if any, well-formed Wh-questions, relative clauses, or sentential
complements, and they could not repeat sentences with verb movement to second position,
omitting the verb or leaving it in a position after the subject (see Friedmann, 2005 for a detailed
description of their syntactic abilities). Eight of the participants had also severe impairment in
tense inflection. MA, ML, and IE had relatively spared TP. Crucially, all of them had unimpaired
production of agreement inflection, indicating that at least the lower part of the syntactic tree was
available for them. Only patients who had at least two-word utterances were included in the
study.
Method
To assess the use of accusative markers with verbs and definite and indefinite object noun
phrases, we used analysis of spontaneous speech as well as elicitation of sentences. Spontaneous
speech was collected and analyzed for 6 participants, the rest of the participants did not produce
enough spontaneous speech or produced only very short utterances without objects. Two more
structured methods were also used to elicit transitive verbs in a sentence. Seven individuals were
asked to describe in one sentence 40 pictures that depicted a transitive verb with one figure that
performs an action on another (an example is given in Figure 1). Four of these 7 individuals also
participated in an additional task, in which they were asked to produce a sentence with a given
inflected verb (e.g. “Say a sentence with the word ‘fixed’ ”). This elicitation task included 100
verbs, 20 of which were transitive verbs (and the rest were verbs that take sentential
complements and intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, reflexives, and unergatives, which were not
analyzed for the current study except for four cases in which the participants produced a sentence
with accusative case as a response). Only sentences that included an object noun phrase were
included in the analysis, and responses that did not include an object were excluded (for
example, for the picture given in Figure 1, one of the participants said Ha-tarnegolet mistareket
“The chicken combs-self” instead of “The girl combs the chicken”, using the reflexive instead of
the target transitive verb, so this response was not included in the analysis). Two individuals
participated both in the spontaneous speech analysis and in the elicitation tests.
Case in agrammatic production 10
Figure 1. An example of a picture used in the Hebrew sentence elicitation task ‘The girl combs the chicken’.
The elicited speech and the spontaneous speech were tape-recorded and transcribed. If the
patients corrected themselves, only the last attempt utterance was analyzed.
The different syntactic properties of Hebrew compared to Dutch allowed us to run a
different type of analysis for Hebrew – recall that Hebrew includes an overt accusative case
marker, et, which appears before definite objects. This allowed us to directly test the appearance
of an accusative case marker in the context of definite objects, and whether they appeared only
when a verb was present. Recall also that Hebrew does not have an indefinite article, and
indefinite objects appear bare, without a determiner, and thus Hebrew sentences in which both
the determiner and the accusative marker are absent are perfectly grammatical, and do not
necessarily indicate omission of the accusative marker or of definiteness markers. Therefore, we
only tested the appearance of accusative case markers with respect to definite objects, and were
not interested in sentences in which the object was indefinite and the case marker was absent.
Such sentences were not included in the analysis. For the same reason, bare subjects are
interpreted as indefinite subjects, and are also perfectly grammatical, and therefore could not be
used in the analysis to indicate a case problem as they do in Dutch.
Thus, the main question for Hebrew was whether each time a definite objects occurs in the
sentence it is preceded by the accusative marker, and whether each time an accusative case
marker occurs, it occurs before a definite object. Then the question was whether these objects
appeared when a verb was realized in the sentence. For these aims, sentences with definite
Case in agrammatic production 11
objects were collected from both spontaneous speech and the elicitation tests. For each definite
object it was determined whether it appeared after the obligatory accusative case marker or not.
In addition, all sentences with an accusative case marker were analyzed to test whether
accusative case marker occurred only before definite objects.
Finally, we examined whether object noun phrases with accusative case marking were
produced in the presence of a case assigning transitive verb. In the sentence-to-verb construction
task the verb was given to the participant, so, naturally, the two other tasks, the elicitation with
the pictures and the spontaneous speech analysis, were more informative with respect to the
production of the verb.
Results - Hebrew
The Hebrew-speaking participants presented excellent ability in their use of the accusative case
marker “et”. A summary of the results of the Hebrew experiment is given in Table 1 (see
Appendix A for individual data).
TABLE 1 Hebrew: Number of definite and indefinite object noun phrases with and without
accusative case marker in spontaneous speech and in elicited sentence production task Accusative
+ definite NP No accusative + definite NP
Accusative + indefinite NP
Spontaneous speech (n=6) 94 2 1 Elicited sentence production (n=7) 219 4 4 Total 313 6 5
The data for the spontaneous speech and for the elicitation tasks were similar (the rate of correct
and incorrect responses in both tasks did not differ significantly, using Mann Whitney,
z = 1.14, p = .25), and the statistical analysis therefore collapsed the data together for the two
individuals who participated in both spontaneous speech and elicitation tasks. The participants
produced a total of 319 definite objects. Most of these definite objects (98%) were produced
correctly with an accusative marker. The accusative marker was omitted only before 6 definite
objects – one proper name, one construct state nominal, and four nouns with a definite article,
one of them following a long pause. We used the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test
for comparisons with an alpha level of .05. The difference between definite objects with
accusative case marker and definite objects without accusative case marker was significant, T =
0, p < .001. In only five sentences the accusative marker was erroneously used before an
Case in agrammatic production 12
indefinite object noun phrase (this happened significantly less than using the accusative marker
correctly before a definite object noun; T = 0, p < .001). In one sentence, the accusative marker
was substituted by a preposition.
Importantly, all 313 definite object noun phrases with an accusative marker were produced in
sentences with a case assigning transitive verb.
Case in Dutch
Participants
Eight Dutch-speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia (mean age 60;1) participated in the
study. They were right-handed and aphasic due to a single stroke in the left hemisphere. All
patients were at least a year post-onset and had been diagnosed with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia
using a standard assessment battery (Dutch version of the Aachen Aphasia Test; Graetz, De
Bleser, & Willmes, 1992). The type of aphasia was confirmed by two aphasiologists.
The speech production of all patients was agrammatic, their speech was characterized by
problems with finiteness of the verbs and/or a low number of verbs, relatively few pronouns,
omission of determiners. Their spontaneous speech included no Wh-questions or embedded
sentences.
Procedure
A picture description task was devised to elicit sentences (developed by Jonkers, 1998). The
picture descriptions were taken from Jonkers (1998). This task consisted of 30 pictures depicting
an action representing a transitive verb (See Figure 2 for an example for a picture used for the
verb aaien, to pet). The patients were asked to describe in one sentence what was happening in
the picture.
The elicited speech was tape-recorded and transcribed. If the patients corrected themselves, only
the last attempt utterance was analyzed. For each item, it was established whether a verb was
produced and which syntactic roles (subject and/or object) were realized, and whether they were
realized as complete noun phrases. The complete noun phrases in our analysis included nouns
with a determiner, mass nouns, bare plural count nouns7 and pronouns, or as incomplete noun
phrases - bare nouns that should have a determiner but were produced without one.
7 Mass nouns and plural count nouns do not need a determiner in languages like English and Dutch. According to Longobardi (1994) these noun phrases should still be analysed as DPs (cf. Abney, 1987) that is as complete noun
Case in agrammatic production 13
Figure 2. An example of the Dutch sentence production task ‘The man pets the dog’.
The subject noun phrases were divided into three groups: subjects that occurred in a
sentence with a case assigning finite verb (5a), subjects with a nonfinite verb (5b), and subjects
without a verb (5c).
(5) a. subject with a finite verb:
Target: De man maait het gras
The man mows the grass
Response: De man maait
The man mows
b. subject with a nonfinite verb:
Target: De man maait het gras
The man mows the grass.
Response: Die kerel… dat gras aan het maaien.
That fellow… that grass on the mow (=mowing).
c. subject without a verb:
Target: De vrouw veegt de straat
The woman sweeps the street
phrases. De Roo (1999) suggested the same for Dutch mass nouns and plural count nouns. We follow Longobardi and de Roo in our analysis and refer to their work for a technical discussion of this issue.
Case in agrammatic production 14
Response: vrouw…straat
woman…street
(6) a. object with a verb:
Target : De vrouw veegt de stoep
The woman sweeps the pavement.
Response: De straat vegen
The street sweep-infinitive
b. object without a verb:
Target: De jongen aait de hond.
The boy pets the dog.
Response: Jongen hond, lieve hond
Boy dog, sweet dog
For the objects we analyzed whether a verb was produced in the sentence or not (6a and b).
Subsequently, all objects with a case-assigning verb were divided into two groups: objects with a
finite verb and objects with a nonfinite verb. This was done to evaluate whether verb presence or
verb finiteness was the important factor for the production of complete noun phrases. Finally, we
also counted how many subjects and objects were not realized and how many finite or nonfinite
verbs were produced in isolation, i.e., without any arguments.
Apart from the elicited sentence production data, we analyzed spontaneous speech
production of each patient with respect to the production of complete and incomplete subject and
object noun phrases. The spontaneous speech production came from the interviews that were part
of the AAT and included questions like ´Could you tell me how your speech problems started´,
and ´Could you tell me something about your job/ family/ hobbies´. These samples consisted of
175-480 words per participant. To be able to determine whether a noun phrase or a pronoun was
used as an object or a subject, only spontaneous utterances with a verb (finite or nonfinite) were
analyzed. Fixed expressions (e.g. weet ik niet ‘I don’t know’) were excluded from the analysis.
For each utterance, it was established whether a verb was produced and which syntactic roles
(subject and/or object) were realized, and whether they were realized as complete noun phrases
or as incomplete noun phrases. We used the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test for all
comparisons, with an alpha level of .05 for all statistical tests.
Case in agrammatic production 15
Results - Dutch The results of the Dutch elicitation study are presented in Tables 2 and 3. Table 2 presents the
number of subject noun phrases in the various conditions, and Table 3 presents the distribution of
object noun phrases (see Appendix B for individual data). We analyzed 201 of the responses to
the pictures (83.8%); 39 (16.2%) could not be analyzed with respect to subject and object
production due to zero reactions (‘I don’t know’), perseverations, paraphasias, or
circumlocutions. None of these included a verb that described the action on the picture even
roughly. In total, only 57.9% of the 201 analyzable utterances contained a finite verb, which was
always realized in the second position as is obligatory in Dutch matrix clauses, 17.1% included a
nonfinite verb, and in 8.8% no verb was realized.
In total, 171 subject noun phrases and 119 object noun phrases were produced. The patients
produced more subjects than objects due to the fact that some of the verbs could also be used
without an object. About half of the subjects were pronouns, all subject pronouns appeared in the
nominative case as required. No case errors were made on the pronouns. No object pronouns
were produced. Of all nouns with a determiner (n = 146), only two nouns appeared with an
incorrect determiner, both due to a gender error.
Significantly more complete subject noun phrases than subject noun phrases without a
determiner were produced when the relevant case assigner, a finite verb, was present, T = 0, p =
.008. When the verb in the sentence was nonfinite, there was no difference between the number
of complete subject noun phrases and subject noun phrases without a determiner, T = 4, p = .22.
No significant difference was found between the number of complete subject noun phrases and
incomplete subject noun phrases also when there was no verb at all, T = 2, p = .18 (see Table 2).
TABLE 2 Dutch: Number of complete and incomplete subject noun phrases in relation to the
presence of a case assigning finite verb Complete Incomplete
Finite verb 128 (97%) 4 (3%)
Non-finite verb 14 (73%) 5 (27%)
No verb 13 (65%) 7 (35%)
Case in agrammatic production 16
Sixty-nine of the subjects were realized as a pronoun. The majority of these pronouns were
produced in the presence of a finite verb (65 out of 69). Only three of these pronouns were
produced with a nonfinite verb and only one was produced without a verb.
The completeness of objects was also found to depend on the verbs, but this time on the
existence rather than on the finiteness of the verbs (see Tables 3 and 4). When a case assigning
transitive verb was used, significantly more complete than incomplete object noun phrases were
produced, T = 0, p = .004. However, when there was no case assigning verb present, more
incomplete than complete objects appeared, but these cases were too few to reach significance
(Because of the number of ties, the Wilcoxon test could not be used. A chi square test yielded
χ2 = 2.94, p = .08).
TABLE 3 Dutch: The total number of complete and incomplete objects in relation to the presence of
their case-assigning verb Complete Incomplete
Verb 81 (79%) 21 (21%)
No verb 6 (35%) 11 (65%)
Table 3 shows that unlike for subjects, and in line with the predictions, the finiteness of the verb
did not play a role in the realization of case on objects (as manifested by determiner production).
When the verb was finite, 80% of the objects were complete noun phrases; when the verb was
nonfinite, 78% of the objects were complete. Thus, for both the finite and nonfinite verbs, the
majority of the object nouns were complete, with no significant difference between finite and
nonfinite verbs with respect to the rate of complete noun phrases (χ2 = 0.05, p = .83 chi-square
for the group was run instead of Wilcoxon here because 4 participants did not produce any object
in one of the conditions). This means that for the production of complete object noun phrases, the
existence of a case assigning transitive verb, rather than verb finiteness, is needed.
TABLE 4 Dutch: The number of complete and incomplete objects in relation to the presence of finite
and nonfinite verbs (number /total) Complete Incomplete
Finite verb 56 (80%) 14 (20%)
Non-finite verb 25 (78%) 7 (22%)
Case in agrammatic production 17
The analysis of the spontaneous speech data shows exactly the same pattern as the data from the
elicitation task. Whenever there was a finite verb, subjects were realized as a complete noun
phrase and not as an incomplete noun phrase (90 vs. 0, which is a significant difference, T = 0,
p = 0.02). In the corpus subjects usually appeared with a finite verb, and therefore there were not
enough instances of subjects with a nonfinite verb to allow for a comparison between complete
and incomplete noun phrases (there were only 3 such instances) or for a comparison between
complete noun phrase subjects with and without verb finiteness. When there was a verb in the
sentence, objects were realized as a complete noun phrase (n = 35) significantly more times than
as an incomplete noun phrase (n = 9), T = 0, p = .02. As in the elicitation task, finiteness did not
play a role for the objects, and no significant difference was found between the number of
complete object noun phrases with finite and nonfinite verbs, T = 5, p = .31. Furthermore, the
rate of complete object noun phrases was not significantly different between finite and nonfinite
verbs, 85% and 72% respectively, χ2 = 1, p = .32.
Discussion
The results from both Hebrew and Dutch indicate that the production of case itself is not
impaired in agrammatism, and that it is tightly related to syntactic preconditions and specifically
to the presence of a proper case assigner in the sentence. Moreover, the results show that
agrammatic speakers respect the syntactic principles of case (Case Filter). The main findings of
the study are that in Hebrew, the accusative case marker is unimpaired and is produced correctly
for 98% of the definite object nouns. In Dutch, pronouns are never produced in a wrong case and
determiners are produced correctly whenever a case assigner is present. In most utterances,
subjects are produced with a determiner when a finite verb is present in the sentence, and objects
are produced with a determiner when a verb (irrespective of its finiteness) is present.
These findings have several implications. Firstly, in line with the findings of de Bleser et al.
(1996) and Ruigendijk and Bastiaanse (2002), as well as with our Preserved Case Hypothesis,
they indicate that case is unimpaired in agrammatic production, and they add support for the
general claim that not all grammatical morphemes are impaired in agrammatism. These results
also indicate that case, determiners, inflection, and verbs are interrelated. The results from
Hebrew indicate a tight relation between case realization and the production of the determiner, as
in 98% of the sentences in which a determiner appeared on the object noun, the accusative case
Case in agrammatic production 18
marker was produced, and in 98% of the sentences in which the case marker was produced, the
object was definite. Furthermore, the results from both Dutch and Hebrew demonstrate a close
connection between the production of case assigning verbs and the production of determiners
and case markers: In Hebrew, object case markers appeared only in sentences that included a
verb. In Dutch, the large majority of the subjects in sentences that included a case-assigning
finite verb, and of objects in sentences that included a verb, was produced with a determiner.
So the most important finding here is that there was a significant difference between
sentences with a case assigner, in which much more noun phrases were complete than
incomplete, and sentences without a case assigner, in which this was not true. When the
conditions for case were met, i.e., when the proper case assigner was present, case was realized
on the noun phrases, and they appeared as complete noun phrases significantly more often.
The results of the current study are readily explained by the combination of current linguistic
theory and theories of agrammatic production. According to current syntactic theory, within the
framework of transformational grammar and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, 2000,
2001), the subject and the object check their case with a case assigner. Subjects check their case
against the tense of the verb that is in Tense Phrase (TP). Objects check their case against the
verb on a low node of the syntactic tree.8 Thus, finiteness, or the tense inflection of the verb, as
well as the movement of the subject (and the verb) to TP are crucial for successful case
assignment to subjects, whereas for objects, the verb itself, rather than its tense inflection, is the
crucial factor, and therefore movement to higher nodes is unnecessary.
When agrammatic speakers fail to move the verb and the subject to TP, the checking of the
subject case against the verb and its tense cannot take place, and therefore when verbs do not
move high up and are uninflected for tense (when they are nonfinite or omitted) case assignment
to the subject fails and the determiner of the subject is omitted. Objects, on the other hand, do not
require movement to high nodes or tense inflection, only the existence of the verb is necessary
8 Specifically: According to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), the case of the subject and the object is checked in spec-head configuration of the noun phrase (DP) and the case assigner. That is to say, the noun phrase is in the specifier position of the phrase, and the case assigner is at the head of the phrase. Subject DPs raise to spec-TP to check their case against the verb and its tense, which are in T0 (following the movement of the verb from VP to T0). Objects check their case with the verb at AgroP according to Chomsky (1995), or at the light v layer according to Chomsky (2000, 2001). Note that although several different frameworks have been suggested for structural case, such as assignment of case with and without AgroP, the aspects that are relevant to our study remain the same: structural case is dependent upon the relation between subject DP and finite V and the relation between object DP and a transitive V, and case for the object NP is assigned in a lower node of the tree.
Case in agrammatic production 19
for them. Thus, when the verb is present in the sentence, even if it is nonfinite and has not moved
to a high node, it can assign case to the object.
Verbs that cannot move to TP to check their tense inflection, or to CP, to which the matrix
verb moves in Germanic languages like Dutch (in order to be in the second sentential position),
are either omitted or left in a non-finite form in a low node (which is in Dutch and German a
sentence-final position, and in Hebrew the position within VP after the subject) (Bastiaanse &
van Zonneveld, 1998; Friedmann, 2000; Kolk & Heeschen, 1992). However, when the verb is
omitted, the assignment of object case is deficient, which, in turn, might lead to the production of
incomplete object noun phrases.
The relation between determiners and case, or, more specifically, the reason for determiner
omission when case is not assigned, is related to the distinction between complete noun phrases,
such as noun phrases with a definite article or pronouns, which are called determiner phrases
(DPs) in Abney’s (1987) terminology9, and incomplete noun phrases (NPs), noun phrases
without a determiner. According to Ouhalla (1993), the Case Filter applies to DPs rather than to
NPs, and case is actually a property of complete noun phrases, and not of incomplete noun
phrases. Thus, DPs in utterances with no suitable case assigner receive no case, and therefore
violate the Case Filter and are ungrammatical, but incomplete NPs without a case assigner do not
violate the Case Filter. This distinction between NPs and DPs explains the omissions of
determiners in our study, which occurred when the subject or the object lacked case. When there
is no case, a determiner cannot appear because a caseless DP is ungrammatical. Therefore, an NP
without a determiner, which is not subjected to the case filter, is produced instead. These results
are in line with earlier studies that showed that the production of determiners in German depends
on the realization of a case-assigning verb (Ruigendijk, 2002; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002).
Ruigendijk and Bastiaanse (2002) show that German agrammatic speakers produce more
complete than incomplete noun phrases when a case assigner is realized, both in spontaneous
speech and in sentence elicitation tasks. When the German individuals with agrammatism do not
realize a case assigner, they omit the determiner much more often than they produce it.
Interestingly, these data also emphasize why testing Dutch is important.
9 In the Government and Binding framework (e.g., Chomsky, 1986), the noun was assumed to be the head of a noun phrase (NP), with the determiner in the specifier position. Abney (1987) presented an alternative analysis, the DP analysis: D (the determiner) is a functional head that takes a noun phrase as its complement, forming a DP, Determiner Phrase.
Case in agrammatic production 20
Whereas these findings on German already showed the strong relationship between
determiner realization and the presence of a case assigner, they could also be argued to be related
to morphological case, which is shown on German determiners. The argumentation could then be
that if no case assigner is present, no morphological case can be determined, and therefore the
determiner’s morphological form remains unspecified, which might lead to determiner omission.
The results we have presented here from Dutch show that it is the syntactic relationship between
case assigners and noun phrases that is important rather than morphology. Since Dutch does not
have morphological case on determiners, there is no morphological reason for article omission
here10. This does not mean however that morphology does not play a role at all, first results from
a close comparison of Dutch and German show that German speakers omit determiners more
often than Dutch speakers (Ruigendijk, 2007).
Recently, the results on Dutch have been replicated in a study in which the spontaneous
speech of 8 Dutch-speaking agrammatic aphasic speakers has been analyzed with regard to the
production and omission rates of determiners and pronouns and – among other things – their
relationship with the presence of a case assigner (Ruigendijk & Baauw, 2007). Ruigendijk and
Baauw (2007) also show that much more complete noun phrases and pronouns are realized if a
case assigner is present than absent. They furthermore demonstrate that it is mainly this syntactic
factor of case assignment that affects the production and omission of determiners in agrammatic
speech, whereas pragmatic factors (realizing a definite or an indefinite determiner) and lexical
and semantic factors (i.e., gender of the determiner and pronoun respectively) do not play a role.
The results of the current study thus strongly suggest that when there is a relevant case
assigner, T or V, the subject and object noun phrases (respectively) are complete. A question
remains regarding the other direction of the implication: the finding that sometimes when no case
assigner was present, the Dutch participants still realized some complete noun phrases. How did
these noun phrases receive case? One possibility is that – at least for the subject noun phrases –
patients can adopt a strategy, so-called default case assignment. Default case assignment is an
option that has been proposed for normal elliptical utterances where structural case assignment
fails: if the subject does not check/receive its case from I, it gets nominative by default (van
Zonneveld, 1994). As was also suggested in Ruigendijk et al. (1999), agrammatic speakers may
be able to use this default option as a strategy when normal case assignment fails. Notice,
10 We thank the reviewer for pointing this important point out to us.
Case in agrammatic production 21
however, that this default strategy cannot be the whole story, because there was a significant
difference in the production of complete subjects when the verb was finite compared to when it
was not finite. Thus, the presence of an appropriate case-assigner in the sentence clearly made a
difference, over and above the default case. This default strategy cannot explain the 6 object
noun phrases that appeared with a determiner without a case-assigning verb. Another problem
for this default explanation is that it is not immediately clear at what level default case is applied.
According to van Zonneveld (1994) it is indeed an alternative abstract case which is assigned if
normal case assignment fails and this could explain the fact that some complete subject noun
phrases occurred without a proper case assigner without violating the Case Filter in our study.
However, this characterization would render the Case Filter vacuous. Schütze (2001) therefore
characterizes default case as “…forms of a language […] that are used to spell out nominal
expressions (e.g. DPs) that are not associated with any case feature assigned or otherwise
determined by syntactic means”. As such it is morphological case which is “neither necessary
nor sufficient for satisfying the Case Filter.” The Case Filter is, according to Schütze, not
morphologically motivated, but a purely configurational requirement. When default case is
morphological case, it is unclear how it can be applied to Dutch determiners that are not
specified (anymore) for morphological case.
Another possible explanation comes from the nature of the task that was used. The patients
were examined with a picture description task. And although they were asked to describe the
pictures in one sentence, they sometimes completely failed to produce a sentence or even a
fragment. Probably some of the patients still wanted to describe the picture as well as possible
within the limits of their impairment and simply started naming the objects and figures they saw
in the picture. When naming items on a picture in Dutch, it is possible to use a determiner in a
deictic way (outside a case assigning context, that is these noun phrases do not have abstract
case), especially if both the patient and the experimenter are looking at the same picture, which
was the case in our study. Results from former studies in which spontaneous speech was
analysed support this explanation. The data in Ruigendijk et al. (1999) and Ruigendijk and
Baauw (2007) show that the number of incomplete noun phrases in the speech of Dutch
agrammatic speakers is (much) higher than the number of complete noun phrases when no case
assigner is present. Namely, when the task does not allow for a naming strategy, the relationship
with no case assigner is clearer, namely when there is no case assigner there are no complete
noun phrase.
Case in agrammatic production 22
However, the more important finding is that as soon as a case assigner is present many more
complete than incomplete noun phrases are realized. This close relation between a case assigner
and the determiner has also been reported for another type of case assigner: prepositions. De Roo
(1995) showed that Dutch-speaking agrammatic patients almost never omit determiners from
within a prepositional phrase (they do not omit “the” from the PP “in-the-garden”), although they
omit determiners that do not appear in a PP approximately 20% of the time (de Roo did not
analyze these omitted determiners with respect to whether or not a verb existed in the sentence).
Ruigendijk (2002) showed that German- and Dutch-speaking agrammatic patients produced
virtually no incomplete noun phrases on a noun phrase insertion task in which the preposition
was provided. Given that prepositions are case assigners, these findings constitute further support
for the claim that determiners are not omitted when a case assigner is present.
To summarize, the causal chain that leads to determiner omissions even though case and
determiners themselves are unimpaired unfolds in the following way. An impairment in syntactic
structure building, causes difficulties in the movement of verbs to TP and CP, and therefore in
many sentences the verb is either omitted, left uninflected or appear in a wrong inflection at a
low node. When a verb is omitted case cannot be assigned to either the subject or the object; a
verb that has not moved to TP cannot assign case to the subject. When the subject or the object
are caseless, they cannot be complete noun phrases because complete noun phrases require case,
and therefore they appear only as incomplete noun phrases, that is, noun phrases without a
determiner. This leads to determiner omissions.
The results have interesting implications for the treatment of individuals with agrammatism.
They indicate that training the production of isolated noun phrases to improve determiner and/or
case marker production will not be enough, since the determiners and case markers are related to
case assigners - verbs. Instead, the results of the present study suggest that determiners and case
markers should be treated in the context of a sentence, and should be accompanied by treatment
of verb production. Treatment that will improve the production of verbs will also improve the
production of complete noun phrases – namely the production of determiners and case. Results
of a study performed by Springer, Huber, Schlenck, and Schlenk (2000) support this clinical
direction. Springer et al. found that in some of their severely agrammatic patients the production
of complete noun phrases increased after treating these patients with a program that aimed at the
production of (infinite) verbs combined with noun phrases (note, however, that treatment that
ignores verb inflection will be inefficient with respect to the case of subjects). Furthermore,
Case in agrammatic production 23
treatment programs that are aimed at improving the accessibility of high syntactic nodes (such as
TP and CP, see Friedmann, Wenkert-Olenik, & Gil, 2000; Shapiro & Thompson, 2006) should
also affect the production of determiners and case markers by increasing the rate of verb
production and inflection production by allowing movement to high nodes.
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Case in agrammatic production 26
Appendix A: Individual data – Hebrew
A.1. Object noun phrases with and without an accusative marker: Spontaneous speech
Accusative +
definite NP
No accusative +
definite NP
Accusative +
indefinite NP
AL 12 0 0
RA 8 0 0
RN 11 0 0
IE 5 0 0
RS 34 1 1
GR 24 1 0
Total 94 2 1
B.2. Object noun phrases with and without the accusative marker: Sentence elicitation tasks
Accusative
+ definite NP
No accusative
+ definite NP
Accusative
+ indefinite NP
AL 43 2 1
RA 48 0 0
HY 15 0 1
ML 31 0 1
SB 60 1 1
MA 5 0 0
AE 17 1 0
Total 219 4 4
Case in agrammatic production 27
Appendix B: Individual data - Dutch
B.1. Subject DPs (complete noun phrases) and NPs (incomplete noun phrases) with a finite verb,
a nonfinite verb and without a verb.
Subjects
With finite verb With nonfinite verb Without a verb Total
subjects Omitted subjects
Participant DP NP DP NP DP NP 1 15 0 1 0 2 0 18 4 2 22 0 4 0 3 0 29 1 3 6 1 0 0 1 0 8 11 4 0 0 2 3 4 4 13 11 5 27 0 0 0 1 0 28 0 6 26 0 0 0 0 0 26 1 7 28 1 0 1 0 0 30 0 8 4 2 7 1 2 3 19 4
Total 128 4 14 5 13 7 171 32
B.2 Object DPs (complete noun phrases) and NPs (incomplete noun phrases) with a finite verb, a
nonfinite verb and without a verb.
Object
With a verb Without a verb Total objects Omitted objects
Participant DP NP DP NP
1 14 2 1 0 17 5
2 12 2 2 2 18 12
3 8 2 0 0 10 9
4 9 4 2 7 22 2
5 1 0 0 1 2 26
6 8 6 0 0 14 13
7 23 2 0 0 25 5
8 6 3 1 1 11 10
Total 81 21 6 11 119 82
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