Syntactic Aspects of Language Disorders

Abstract

Abstract Sentences convey relationships between the meanings of words, such as who is accomplishing an action or receiving it. These aspects of semantic meaning, collectively known as the propositional content of a sentence, vastly extend the power of language beyond what is available through single words and word formation processes to enable language to represent events and states of affairs. Propositions can be used for updating semantic memory, for reasoning, and for many other purposes. Thus, they constitute a vital link between language and other cognitive processes. Syntactic structures, hierarchically organized sets of syntactic categories, provide the means through which the meanings of individual words are combined with one another to represent propositional meaning (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1986, 1995). In analyzing these structures, individual lexical items are marked for syntactic category (e.g., cat is a noun [N]; read is a verb [V]; of is a preposition [P]). These categories combine to create nonlexical nodes (or phrasal categories), such as noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP), sentence (S), etc. The way words are inserted into these higher-order phrasal categories determines a number of different aspects of sentence meaning.