case in dutch and hebrew aphasiology v2 compact

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, [email protected] or to Naama Friedmann, [email protected].

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.


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 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.


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 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).


(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).


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


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.


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


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


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


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.


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.


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%)


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%)


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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,


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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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


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

case in dutch and hebrew aphasiology v2 compact

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