Clause structure and verb movement in a Greek–English speaking bilingual patient with Broca’s aphasia: Evidence from adverb placement

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a Greek–English bilingual patient with Broca’s aphasia and mild agrammatism on the placement of CP, MoodP, AspectP, and NegP-related adverbs, labeled specifier-type adverbs, and VP-related adverbs, labeled complement-type adverbs, by means of a constituent ordering task and a grammaticality judgment task. Based on the results derived by means of these two different tasks in both Greek and English, we argue that (i) the CP layer causes great difficulties to aphasic performance in both languages but it is not missing from aphasic grammar, whereas the VP layer remains intact in both languages; (ii) the MoodP, AspectP, and NegP-related adverbs cause more difficulties in English that in Greek. We attribute this to the independent differences between English and Greek that relate to properties of verbal morphology and syntactic head movement.