Don’t give an affirmative order. A negative one is easier!

Eleonora Rossi *, Roelien Y.R.M. Bastiaanse

Graduate School for Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN), University of Groningen, Department of Linguistics,

P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS, Groningen, The Netherlands

Accepted 6 July 2006

Introduction

In Italian, imperative sentences display two different types of verbs(Zanuttini, 1996).

(1) Mangia!Eat2nd person sing.!(2) Mangiamo!Let’s eat 1st person plur.!(1) is a true imperative, (2) is a

suppletive imperative. True imperatives are underspecified fortense, aspect and mood, whereas suppletive imperatives have aricher morphology. Italian displays only one true imperative formas shown in (1) (Zanuttini, 1997, 2001). The special syntactic char-acteristics of true imperatives can be seen in negative imperativesentences.

(3) * Non mangia!Not eat2nd person sing.!(4) Non mangiare!Not eatinf.

In Italian, imperative sentences are negated by the preverbal negativemarker ‘non’ which heads NegP-1 (Zanuttini, 1996, 2001). Simplifyingthe structure, Zanuttini assumes that the NegP-1 is lower than CP andhigher than MoodP. It is in CP� that the imperative features need to bechecked by a suitable element such as a verb or a negative marker (Zanut-tini, 1997, 2001). In affirmative imperatives the verb can freely move fromVP� to CP� by a long movement to check the imperative features. When anegative imperative is involved, the imperative features in CP and moodfeatures in MoodP need to be checked. Therefore, the negative marker‘non’ moves to CP� (being the closest element to CP�) and the verb shouldmove from VP� to MoodP�. As introduced true imperatives lack Tenseand Mood and therefore the verb cannot move to check Mood featuresleading to an ungrammatical sentence, as in (3). Instead, a surrogate infin-itive verb (which bears Mood and Tense) has to be used. The result is agrammatical sentence as in (4).

Agrammatism is an acquired language problem which affects the gram-mar of the language. Some studies suggest that agrammatic speakers haveproblems with syntactic movement. This was shown for Dutch by Bastia-anse and co-authors both for verb movement (Bastiaanse & Van Zonne-veld, 1998; Bastiaanse & Thompson, 2003b) and object scrambling(Bastiaanse, Koekkoek, & Van Zonneveld, 2003a). Though, some otherstudies suggest that verb movement is intact, like for Italian (Lonzi &Luzzatti, 1993). Our results will suggest that indeed verb movement is

impaired in agrammatism but the discriminatory variable for difficulty islength of movement.

Hypothesis

Italian agrammatic speakers will have more difficulties to produce affir-mative imperative sentences than negative ones. In the first case the verbhas to move with a long movement from VP� to CP�. In the second case,the negative particle moves with a short movement to CP� and the (infin-itival) verb moves with a short movement to Mood�.

Methods

Subjects, material, and procedure

Five Italian non-brain-damaged speakers and four Italian Brocaspeakers were tested. The two groups were matched for age, handednessand education. A sentence completion task was used. There were two con-ditions: an affirmative imperative condition (30 items) and a negativeimperative one (30 items). Participants were prompted with a pictureand an imperative sentence. They had to complete the contrasting imper-ative sentence. Below an example:

Experimenter: Marco dice a Maria:’’Non magiarlo!’’. Anche/InveceGianni dice a Maria:’’. . .Participant: . . .:’’Non mangiarlo!’’ / . . . ‘‘Mangialo!’’Experimenter: Marco tells to Maria: ’’Do not eat it!’’ Also/InsteadGianni tells to Maria:’’ . . ...Participant: . . .:’’Do not eat it!’’ / . . .’’Eat it!’’

Statistical analysis

In order to check for the difficulty in the production of verbs in the twoconditions, the number of correct verbal forms in affirmative and negativeimperatives for both groups was analyzed. v2 was used as a test for differ-ences between verbal forms production.

Results

Overall, non-brain-damaged speakers performed at ceiling, alwaysusing a correct verb structure in both conditions. Broca speakers, instead,produced 55% of correct verbal forms in the affirmative imperative condi-

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2006.06.048

* Corresponding author. Fax: +0031503636855.E-mail address: e.rossi@rug.nl (E. Rossi).

www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l

Brain and Language 99 (2006) 8–219

tion. In the negative imperative condition the use of correct verbal formsreaches 100%. The difference between the two conditions is significant(X2 = 60.8; df = 1; p = .00). The difference in the affirmative imperativecondition between Broca speakers and non-brain-damaged speakers wassignificant (X2 = 73.5; df = 1; p = .00) as well. The error analysis for theaffirmative imperative condition revealed that when a correct verbal formwas not used suppletive infinitive or suppletive indicative verbs were used.Table 1 illustrates the production of verb structures for the Broca group inboth conditions.

Conclusions

Our data confirm our hypothesis. Broca speakers are worse in produc-ing true affirmative imperatives than negative imperatives. The results sug-gest that they are indeed able to produce short movements as in the case ofnegative imperatives (moving the verb from VP� to MoodP� and the

preverbal negative particle from NegP� to CP�) but they are unable to pro-duce long movements as it should be the case in affirmative imperatives(moving the verb from VP� to CP�). In order to avoid this long movement,they move the verb to the first available position, i.e., MoodP�. Unavoid-ably, the result is an ill formed true affirmative imperative.

References

Bastiaanse, R., Koekkoek, J., & Van Zonneveld, R. (2003a). Objectscrambling in Dutch Brocas aphasia. Brain and Language, 86, 287–299.

Bastiaanse, R., & Thompson, K. (2003b). Verb and auxiliary movement inagrammatic Broca‘s aphasia. Brain and Language, 84, 286–305.

Bastiaanse, R., & Van Zonneveld, R. (1998). On the relation between verbinflection and verb position in Dutch agrammatic aphasics. Brain and

Language, 64, 165–181.Lonzi, L., & Luzzatti, C. (1993). Relevance of adverb distribution for the

analysis of sentence representation in agrammatic patients. Brain and

Language, 45, 306–317.Zanuttini, R. (1996). On the relevance of tense for sentential negation. In

Parameters and functional heads: Essays in comparative syntax. NewYork: Oxford university press.

Zanuttini, R. (1997). Negation and clausal structure: A comparative study

of romance languages. Oxford: Oxford university press.Zanuttini, R. (2001). Sentential negation. In The handbook of contempo-

rary syntactic theory. Blackwell.

Table 1Broca group: Verbal production

Affirmative imperative % Negative imperative %

Correct 55 100Suppletive infinitive 36 —Suppletive indicative 9 —

78 Abstracts / Brain and Language 99 (2006) 8–219