A study of agrammatism with special reference to Hebrew

Sasak is spoken language used by Sasak speakers in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. This language is included into Bali-Sasak-Samawa subgroup. Most of the linguists and researchers constructed this language using SVO, but they do not explore the possible movement of the Noun Phrases (NPs) as the basis of constructing its structure. So, it is a need to have the possibility of the NPs movement whether the predicates in Sasak require one or two argument. Data used in this writing are taken through documentary method. They are analyzed using case theory proposed by Chomsky. The analysis shows that both raising verbs and raising adjective involve phrases case. They do not allow structural case movement. In addition, both induce raising. However, they are different in selecting source of NP movement; raising verbs finite or non finite clause, and raising adjective finite clause. Passivization also induces NP-movement in Sasak. Moreover, passive verbs in Sasak can be followed by preposition of locative or not depend on the notion of the verbs used. It has the same analogy with unaccusativity verbs. They lack of internal argument and cannot assign accusative case.

Agrammatism is a language disorder characterised by a morphological and/or syntactic deficit in spontaneous speech. Such deficits are usually associated with comprehension disorders - though it is said that this is not always the case - which result in a certain degree of variability in syntactic, lexical, and morpholexical performance. The purpose of this study is to reconsider the nature of comprehension disorders in agrammatism, to test whether Grodzinsky's Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) can be generalised to all agrammatic patients, and to ascertain whether the pattern of impairment observed in agrammatism differs from that present in fluent aphasic patients. Eleven agrammatic patients were tested by means of a sentence comprehension task comprising simple active and passive reversible sentences. The performance of the agrammatic patients was compared to that of 16 fluent aphasic (10 Wernicke's and 6 conduction) and 10 control subjects. The deficits observed in the agrammatic subjects were compatible with the TDH, but there was also impaired processing of pronouns (elements that are also subject to movement) and a mild deficit on the processing of simple active sentences. The fluent aphasic patients showed a similar pattern of impairment. A logistic regression analysis was then applied to each single case separately, in order to study the homogeneity of the patients' performance within each aphasic subgroup. Of the 11 agrammatic patients, 3 did not show comprehension disorders, 5 had a specific deficit for passive movement, 1 a lexical deficit for pronouns only, and 1 a pattern of impairment compatible with Linebarger et al.'s trade-off theory. The last patient showed a deficit for simple active reversible sentences compatible with damage to the mapping of grammatical functions to thematic roles. Similar patterns of impairment were also found in the fluent aphasic sample. Overall, the results lead to the conclusion that the TDH cannot be generalised to all agrammatic patients, that the mechanism it invokes is not the only source responsible for agrammatic comprehension disorders and also contributes to comprehension disorders in fluent aphasic patients.

In legal context, lawsuits are considered as important reports and documents because they involve verdicts or the same decision of the judicial authority. All or some of the verdicts of the dispute are resolved. So, they are binding and decisive. By examining the texts, it was clearly seen that they are ellipsis and ambiguities which are included some verbs and nominal groups that according to equivalent-deletion rule are omitted. Actually, these ambiguities and ellipsis arose over the coordination of one verb with another one by using and as relative clause in order to avoid the repetition. The nominal groups as subjects which are omitted because of the topicalization to make passive sentence is another ambiguous factor. Therefore, the first question of the present article is what each clause of the written lawsuits represent according to Halliday’s transitivity model and the second question of the research seeks which process, participants, and circumstances have the most frequency. Whatever were mentioned above leads to select and analyze 48 criminal and legal lawsuits randomly from the 50s to the 90s by utilization of the transitivity model from Halliday’s ideational metafunction as an efficient tool. Frist of all, the ellipsis elements are found into the text. Then, by diagnosis of the sort of the process in terms of semantically; the variety of the participants would recognize. Afterwards the sort of circumstances of each clause demonstrate the manner and reason of the occurrence of process. All the elements of transitivity model are represented in a table. The descriptive statistics have been used to measure the frequency of data and some tables are drawn to show them. At the end, all the frequencies would compare and interpret. According to the first question of this research, the material process in legal discourse involves the performance of action. Same clauses which in terms of discourse are related with this kind of process show the strength of the verbal of the judge or prosecutor. Such clauses are more active and dynamic. The sort of the participants which are more used in this process are goal and actor. So, the goal participant indicates that in this genre, the action is more important than the actor, for this reason the clauses are seen as topicalization with a passive structure. In some clauses, the relational process expresses and explains the situation and the scene of crime. however, it describes the reason of the issued verdicts in another clauses. Therefore, the gender of its participants is identified, identifier, carrier, and attributing. the attributing is the only participants which has the highest frequency. In fact, the description of the situation is more significant. The clauses which are included a speech by a person as a judicial representative that they announce the final verdict is verbal process. In this process, participants are sayer, receiver, and target. The only participant which is more used in these texts is target because it is more important to know the results of the discussion and the decision. Some clauses which are representing the desire and aspiration are a mental process with the participants of the sensor and the phenomenon or stimulus. Such clauses are made by the person as defendant or claimant, so they don’t have verbal power in terms of discourse. The existence of evidence implies an existential process, and the only participant in this process is the existing element, so the first hypothesis is acceptable. The second question showed that the material process has the highest frequency. in this way the second hypothesis is rejected. The conclusions demonstrated that the legal genre emphasizes on the validity of the verdicts and the characteristics of each clauses were included: order to take action and commutation, explain and comment the situation, express the facts and evidence in the crime scene, announce and request the verdicts because all processes are observed except the behavioral process. No such statement was found in such texts to indicate the external manifestations of the acts. The writing style of these texts shows, the documents and evidences are stated at first, then the verdict and judgment are written. In general, the frequency of the material process demonstrated that the legal genre emphasizes the necessity of enforcing judgments and instructions rather than external behaviors. It seems that there is a correlation between the type of processes and the circumstances’ elements; Because the circumstances’ elements which are more commutation and act, they show the necessity of carrying out the sentences. In the legal genre of litigation, this circumstances’ element emphases on the enforceability of judgments. Key words: lawsuit, legal text, transitivity model, and ideational metafunction.

This paper reports on a study on the dual coding process involved in an agrammatic patient when comprehending sentences using a sentence to picture matching test. The test was undertaken at The National Stroke Association of Malaysia (NASAM), Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The current study employs the theory of Paivio’s (1991) Dual Coding Theory (DCT) as an explanation for the agrammatic patient’s ability to comprehend active and passive sentences and adopts an influential hypothesis by Grodzinsky’s (1990) Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) concerning agrammatism that characterises agrammatic patients as a good comprehender of Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentence structure, the active sentence but as bad comprehenders of Object Verb Subject (OVS) sentence structure, the passive sentences. A comprehension test, the Sentence to Picture Matching Test designed by Christensen (2001) has been adopted in this study to examine the suitability of dual coding theory as an explanation for the agrammatic patient’s comprehension ability. The performance of the patient’s comprehension pattern in this study supports the account of TDH and in general, the findings of this study suggest that sentence to picture matching test could be used to investigate the dual coding process of the agrammatic patient.

در این پژوهش در جست‌وجوی تبیینی یکدست برای تمامی کاربردهای حال التزامی در زبان فارسی معاصر، ابتدا با اتکا به پیکره‌ای با حدود ۳۰۰۰ جملۀ حال التزامی، استخراج و دسته‌بندی شده‌‌است. در جملات ساده و در بندهای موصولی، عامل التزامی‌ساز عموما معنایی است. عامل التزامی‌ساز در بندهای متممی و بندهای قیدی، به‌ترتیب فعل جملۀ اصلی و حرف ربط است. در ادامه با استفاده از رویکرد کامری و تمایز سه‌شقی زمان گفتار، زمان رویداد و زمان مرجع نشان دادیم که حال التزامی دارای زمان نسبی (مقابل زمان مطلق) است. همچنین با اتخاذ رویکرد درزی و کواک در تبیین کاربردهای التزامی در بندهای متممی، به بررسی کاربردهای این وجه در جملات ساده و بندهای موصولی و قیدی جملات مرکب پرداخته‌ایم. نتیجه اینکه زمان مرجع در جملات ساده و بندهای موصولی برابر با زمان گفتار است؛ طوری­که این افعال لزوما به حال یا آینده اشاره دارند. در بندهای متممی فعل بند اصلی، زمان مرجع فعل التزامی است. زمان مرجع در بندهای قیدی بسته به نوع حرف ربط، ممکن است برابر با زمان گفتار یا زمان فعل اصلی باشد. چه زمان مرجع، برابر با زمان گفتار باشد و چه برابر با زمان فعل اصلی باشد، در هر صورت فعل التزامی دارای «زمان نسبی غیرگذشته» است.

The present study aims to investigate passive constructions in Chinese within the framework of generative grammar. In English, a passive verb is marked by the passive morpheme-en, and it is assumed that passivization in English involves A-movement to Spec-IP to satisfy the Case filter (Chomsky, 1986). By contrast, Chinese employs no morphological markings to manifest passivity of a passive form. A passive sentence is typically marked by the presence of bei, a marker widely accepted as indicating passivization. Three main positions on the status of bei and the relevant derivational processes of passives are under scrutiny in the study. The position adopted is the verbal approach, in which bei is analyzed as a verb, in virtue of the fact that it can account for a range of phenomena without inviting theoretical complications. A preliminary account of some c-selectional properties of bei, as proposed in this study, reinforces the verbal approach by treating bei as a verb taking resultative verb compounds as complements. Inalienable objects constitute another area of grammar where passive verbs behave differently between English and Chinese. This study also provides a basis for future research on Chinese or English in a wider context of second language acquisition/teaching.

Syntactic comprehension in Parkinson’s disease: Type of embedding and canonicity

Thematic roles can be seen as semantic labels assigned to who/what is taking part in the event denoted by a verb. Encoding thematic relations is crucial for sentence interpretation since it relies on both syntactic and semantic aspects. In previous studies, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the left inferior intraparietal sulcus (l-IPS) selectively influenced performance accuracy on reversible passive (but not active) sentences. The effect was attributed to the fact that in these sentences the assignment of the agent and theme roles requires re-analysis of the first-pass sentence parsing.To evaluate the role of reversibility and non-canonical word order (passive voice) on the effect, rTMS was applied over l-IPS during a sentence comprehension task that included reversible and irreversible, active and passive sentences. Participants were asked to identify who/what was performing the action or who/what the action was being performed on.Stimulation of the l-IPS increased response time on reversible passive sentences but not on reversible active sentences. Importantly, no effect was found on irreversible sentences, irrespective of sentence diathesis.Results suggest that neither reversibility nor sentence diathesis alone are responsible for the effect and that the effect is likely to be triggered/constrained by a combination of semantic reversibility and non-canonical word order. Combined with the results of previous studies, and irrespective of the specific role of each feature, these findings support the view that the l-IPS is critically involved in the assignment of thematic roles in reversible sentences.

Syntactic movement in Turkish agrammatic production

رده­شناسی2 شاخه­ای از زبان­شناسی است که شباهت­های ساختاری بین زبان­ها را بدون توجه به تاریخ آن­ها مورد بررسی قرار می­دهد. بررسی­های زبان شناسان ثابت کرده است که زبان­های مختلف دنیا مشترکاتی نیز دارند که به آن­ها، جهانی­های زبان گفته می­شود؛ بررسی ترتیب سازه­ها یکی از مهم­ترین مباحث رده­شناسی زبان است؛ زیرا زبان­ها در این مورد تنوع بیشتری نشان می­دهند و این تنوع دست­مایه­ای برای بررسی­ رده­شناختی زبان به شمار می­آید. یکی از این موارد تنوع، توالی هسته و بند موصولی است. رده­شناسان دو گونه توالی اسم و بند موصولی را در زبان­ها مشخص کرده­اند: هسته - بند موصولی و بند موصولی - هسته. از نظر آنها این دو توالی­ با آرایش سازه­های اصلی زبان­ها به ویژه (مفعول و فعل) همبستگی دارد. بنابر این طبق پیش­بینی­های آنها، توالی هسته - بند موصولی اکثرا در زبان­های فعل - مفعول و توالی بند موصولی - هسته در زبان­های مفعول - فعل هستند. در گفتار حاضر ساخت موصولی در زبان­های فارسی و عربی را در چهارچوب رده­شناسی بررسی می‌کنیم تا روشن شود که ویژگی­های ساخت موصولی در زبان­های فارسی و عربی چگونه است و چه شباهت­ها و تفاوت­هایی میان این دو ساخت در فارسی و عربی وجود دارد. به علاوه، این پژوهش در پی آن است تا مشخص کند که توالی هسته اسمی و بند موصولی در هر دو زبان چه نسبتی با پیش­بینی­های متخصصین رویکرد رده‌شناسی دارد. روش تحقیق توصیفی - تحلیلی است و جملات مورد بررسی از متون مختلف گونۀ رسمی هر دو زبان فارسی و عربی جمع­آوری شده است. بیش از ده هزار جمله مورد بررسی قرار گرفت. از نتایج پژوهش می‌توان به این موارد اشاره کرد که روشن شد زبان­های فارسی و عربی از الگوی غالب جهانی در ترتیب بند موصولی و هستۀ اسمی تبعیت می­کنند یعنی در هر دو زبان بند موصولی بعد از هستۀ خود قرار می­گیرد؛ اما در این زمینه زبان فارسی طبق پیش‌بینی‌های انجام‌شده برای زبان­های فعل پایان یا زبان­های OV عمل نمی­کند. در حالی که زبان عربی با پیش‌بینی‌های ارائه‌شده برای زبان­های VO سازگار است.همچنین یکی دیگر از نتایج این تحقیق این است که رخ دادن پدیدۀ خروج بند موصولی در زبان فارسی امکان­پذیر است ولی در زبان عربی رخ نمی­دهد.

This is a reference grammar of Munya, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the western part of Sichuan province in China. The data that this thesis draws from were collected during a one-year immersion fieldwork and are analyzed within the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory. This study covers the core aspects of the language, including phonetics and phonology, morphology, word classes, grammatical categories, clause structures, and discourse and pragmatics. Munya has a fairly large phoneme inventory, with forty consonants and thirteen vowels. The language has a binary tonal contrast, a high tone and a low tone, and the two tones constitute a range of patterns. Morphological processes in Munya include cliticization, affixation, reduplication and vowel alternation. The language has a wide variety of vowel harmonies. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are open word classes and there are in addition eight closed classes. The major syntactic function of nouns is to function as arguments. They can take numeral classifiers and plural markers. The major syntactic function of verbs is to act as predicates. Most verbs can be morphologically analyzed as consisting of a root and a directional prefix. There are altogether seven directional prefixes in Munya. Verbs show person-number inflection and derivations of causative and pluractionality. The predominant person-number inflectional paradigm is first person singular, second person singular, and first or second person non-singular. Adjectives can modify nouns and function as predicates, and tend to be inherently reduplicated. There are ten cases in Munya. Core syntactic functions can be marked by the ergative case i, the absolutive case (in zero form), the genitive case ɣɛ, the dative case le and the experiential case ɣɛ. The patterns of alignment are different for different types of verbs. For control verbs, the pattern is basically ergative-absolutive, and for non-control verbs, the pattern is consistently nominative-accusative. There are three aspects, which are the stative aspect, the perfective aspect and the imperfective aspect. There are also three evidential markers, which are the direct evidential, the indirect evidential and the reported evidential. There are two egophorics in Munya. ŋo can only be used in context of first or second person subject and control predicate. nyi can occur with all persons and all types of predicates. Copula verbs in Munya can denote IDENTITY, LOCATION, EXISTENCE, and POSSESSION. The senses of LOCATION, EXISTENCE and POSSESSION can be expressed with one copula. Munya has multiple copula verbs of existence, the choice of which is determined by the semantics of the Copula Determining Referent (CDR), which can be realized as copula subject or copula complement. Some copulas have extended functions. When attached to copulas, the directional prefix tʰo - 'away from the speaker' can mark perfectiveness. Polar interrogatives and negations are expressed with prefixes on verbs or auxiliaries. Imperatives can be categorized into second-person imperative clauses and first person imperative clauses, and the former can be further classified into immediate imperative, future imperative and polite imperative. Munya has relative clauses and complement clauses, and the two types of structures are closely related to nominalization. Munya has indirect, direct, and semi-direct speech reports. In semi-direct speech report, the subject in the matrix clause and the embedded clause are co-referential, and the subject in the embedded clause needs to shift to the reflexive form. Meanwhile, the verb or auxiliary in the embedded clause inflects for the person-number of the subject before it is shifted. The narrative genre of Munya discourse features prevalent bridging constructions, including recapitulative linkage and summary linkage. In the first type of linkage, a dependent clause is used to recapitulate in verbatim or in close paraphrase the preceding clause, and in the second type, a clause containing a demonstrative anaphorically summarizes the content of a discourse unit, typically a paragraph. At the end of the thesis there is an appendix of a long story and a vocabulary of around 2,800 words.

Deficits in language comprehension have been observed in older individuals, particularly affecting comprehension of complex syntactic constructs such as passive sentences. Aphasic adults display a qualitatively similar pattern, with passive constructions being more difficult to comprehend than active constructs. Various types of context have been found to influence auditory comprehension in aphasia, including the comprehension of passive constructions. In particular, visual stimulation has been observed to facilitate the comprehension of complex spoken messages for many aphasic adults. However, it is unclear whether presenting visual stimuli prior to auditory stimuli is more facilitative than initially presenting auditory stimuli. Furthermore, in light of reported age-related declines in comprehension of passive constructions, it is unknown whether age affects the influence of visual stimulation and, if so, when these effects are more facilatory. In this investigation the influence of pictorial stimulation on sentence comprehension was examined for 12 older and 10 younger aphasic adults. The two aphasic groups were tested on the comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences presented in isolation or in paragraphs. Subjects heard the stimuli prior to or after seeing accompanying pictures which were black-and-white line drawings depicting the two possible subjects–object relations presented in the reversible sentences. The older aphasic subjects were significantly more accurate than the younger subjects in the post-exposed visual condition, as well as on isolated passive sentences in which there was no paragraph context. In both of these conditions the availability of contextual information (visual–pictorial or auditory–linguistic) was minimized. In the other conditions in which supportive visual–pictorial or auditory–linguistic context was provided prior to the presentation of the target sentences, the older and younger groups demonstrated similar levels of impaired performance. The results are discussed relative to the ageing process, allocation of resources, and working memory capacity.

Background: A number of hypotheses have been formulated to account for comprehension data in agrammatic aphasia. They explain deficits in comprehending specific structures, such as semantically reversible non-canonical sentences, for example, Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH, Grodzinsky, 1986, 1990, 1995), or functional categories, for example, Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH, e.g., Friedmann, 2006); Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (TUH, Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004, 2005); Interpretable Features’ Impairment Hypothesis (IFIH; e.g., Varlokosta et al., 2006). Several studies, however, report evidence contradicting these theories (e.g., Caramazza, Capasso, Capitani, & Miceli, 2005; Dickey, Milman, & Thompson, 2008) and propose new accounts to explain the comprehension deficits in agrammatic aphasia, for example, Distributed Morphology Account (DMA, Dickey et al., 2008). Aims: Against the background above, this study investigates the ability of three Greek-speaking agrammatic individuals to comprehend a wide range of structures and functional categories: semantically reversible (canonical) active and (non-canonical) passive sentences, Complementizer Phrase, subject-verb Agreement, Tense, and Aspect. Methods & Procedures: We administered: (a) two sentence-picture matching tasks to test comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences, and Tense; (b) a sentence grammaticality judgement task to test judgement of Tense, Aspect, and subject-verb Agreement; and (c) a picture-pointing task to test comprehension of Complementizer Phrase. Outcomes & Results: (a) Two of the three agrammatic participants performed at chance on reversible passive sentences and above chance on active sentences. The third participant performed equally high on the two sentence types. Two participants performed at chance on Tense comprehension and one above chance. (b) The three participants were selectively or across-the-board impaired in judgement of Agreement, Tense, and Aspect. One of the two selectively affected participants had chance performance on Aspect and above chance performance on Agreement and Tense. The other one performed at chance on Aspect and Tense, and above chance on Agreement. The third participant's performance was equally poor on all three categories. (c) All three agrammatic participants performed above chance on the comprehension of Complementizer Phrase. Conclusions: In comprehension/judgement, canonical and non-canonical sentences do not dissociate in all agrammatic speakers, while functional categories associated with the verb morphology may be compromised in the face of relatively well-preserved categories that are located higher in the syntactic hierarchy. All three agrammatic participants support the DMA, and two of them support the TDH. Instead, none of them provided support to the TPH, TUH, and IFIH.

Passive Sentence Comprehension in Thai Agrammatic Speakers

The aim of this paper is the analysis of errors commonly madein the 9-th grade students in urban and rural Albanian schools in the academic year 2018-2019 in using the passive voice. A quantitative approach is applied in conducting the research. The samples of the research are 24 students in both schools, 12 students in each school. The descriptive analysis method is used in this research to find the errors of the students and to analyze the data. “The major focus of this study is the Contrastive Analysis between the English passive forms through their Albanian correspondents; contribute to the theoretical linguistics, to the general theory of contrastive linguistics, to the development of contrastive studies in Albanian, to the development of Albanian prescriptive grammars.” [1] Theory of English grammar was used to know and understand the structure of English passive voice.While, the theory of error analysis was used to analyze the student’ errors based on the Linguistic Category Taxonomy particularly for the English passive voice, and Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis was used to find out the similarity and the difference between English and Albanian passive voice. My assumption is that the difficulties the Albanian learners of English face are due to the following: 1. English and Albanian being typologically two different languages, bilingual ones: a. English as a typical analytical language. [2] b.The paradigm of the verb in the Albanian language is very wealthy in word-form. It includes 251 analytic and synthetic forms, from them, 49 are synthetic forms. These synthetic forms are built mostly using two grammatical tools: “ ndajshtesat eptimore ” which play the main role, in the verb eptim, and morphological changing, to which play not only the matter role in the grammatical forms building . [3] The English language in comparison with the Albanian and other languages has a lot of similarities and differences in passives. This study points out and finds differences and similarities between English and Albanian passives. Both of these languages have to be understood by the learners prior to learning the target language. First, besides, the Albanian learners in learning the English language are frequently influenced by Albanian structure and to transfer the forms and meanings from Albanian native language to the English language. Second, the results of data analysis clearly show that most passives are marked with “jam” and “folje ne te tashme” dhe “pjesore e shkuar e disa foljeve te shqipes ne prapashtesa –re (ne bere), -ar (ne punuar)”, which are also translated into passive in English (‘be’ plus ‘past participle’) plus ‘by-agent’. Some passives, namely translated into passives in English and some others are translated into actives. Third, in translating Albanian passives into English shifts inevitably take place on a grammatical level, on the aspect of tense. Part of the study is transitive, non-transitive, infinitives, its structure and the omission of it, participles and its comprehensions, gerunds, the structure and the use of them that change a lot from both languages, including the forms of – ing in comparing to English, the forms of “pa lare, me te lare dhe nje te lare”, which do not have forms, changing the forms of tenses, the use of “by-phrase”, passive clauses, incorrectness of ‘be’ and its omission, the correct use of conditionals, the misspelling of modals, wrong using of the order of passives, misformation of conditionals, the future “going to”, modals, passive infinitives all in passives. Keywords: Be, modal, transitive, non-transitive, by, passive voice, contrastive analysis, error analysis, data analyzing.