Aphasia manifestations in Basque

Abstract

This paper presents a description of the main symptoms of agrammatism found in a corpus of spontaneous speech production of 59 Basque-speaking aphasic patients. The main symptoms relate to deficits in the production of inflectional morphology. From the standpoint of grammatical structure, the deficits involve the production of the syntactic category Infl, that heads the sentence (IP). Basque has a morphologically complex Inflection, containing up to three agreement markers, plus tense and modality specifications. The most outstanding symptom of agrammatism is the absence of inflected verbs, or its extremely low frequency, correlated with a high frequency of uninflected participial forms. The study of the inflected forms produced in aphasic speech reveals a significant number of errors in the selection of appropriate morphemes, particularly number and dative agreement markers, and a considerable number of newly coined impossible forms, resulting form the combination of morphemes from conflicting paradigms. However, the relative order of the morphemes in the auxiliary is correct, which could indicate that the basic structure of Inflection is not affected, at least in the case of patients that produce inflected forms. Errors in case-marking also appear, mostly involving ergative and absolutive markers.