Title: Long and short passives in Catalan and Spanish
Abstract: AbstractBackground: Poor comprehension of verbal passives in agrammatism is well attested; however, short passives have been seldom investigated, only for some Germanic languages.Aims: Here we investigate long and short passives in two Romance languages, Catalan and Spanish and, consider the implications of our results for our understanding of comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia and for the theoretical construal of passive sentences. We test the hypothesis that long and short passives are equally misunderstood because their underlying structures are more similar than their surface form may indicate.Methods: To that effect, we designed a truth-value judgement task and tested fourteen patients with Broca's aphasia, seven speakers per language.Results: We show that long and short passives are equally miscomprehended, consistently across the two languages and speakers: patients performed at chance with both types of passives, while they performed above chance with active sentences.Conclusion: The results for Romance are in line with those previously found for English (the only formerly investigated Germanic language with the same word order as Spanish and Catalan). The indistinguishable performance with long and short passives provides an argument to be added to those in the linguistic literature for the analysis of short passives as involving a covert external argument. It also provides an argument for structural accounts over processing accounts of the comprehension deficit of Broca's aphasia.Keywords: Broca's aphasiaLong passivesShort passivesImplicit external argumentCatalanSpanishView correction statement:Erratum NotesThe authors are indebted to the patients who took part in the experiment, for their indispensable collaboration. The authors also thank the staff of the Hospital de Sant Pau (with Carlota Faixa deserving special mention) in Barcelona, and the staff of the Hospital Dr José María Cullen and Hospital de Rehabilitación Integral del Discapacitado Dr Carlos Vera Candioti (in particular María Eugenia Prato and Victoria Rodríguez Jáuregui) in Santa Fe. The authors are grateful to Josep Romeu for preparing the materials and running the experiment with some of the Catalan subjects (results for those subjects were reported in Gavarró and Romeu (Citation2010)), to Anna Espinal (Servei d'Estadística Aplicada, UAB) for her help with the statistics and to two anonymous reviewers for their thorough comments. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 48th Meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, held in Athens in 2010, at the Colloquium of Generative Grammar, held in Bellaterra in 2012 and at the 6o Encuentro de Gramática Generativa held in General Roca, Argentina, in 2013; we are grateful to the audiences in those meetings for their comments. The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of projects FFI2011-29440-C03-03 and 2009SGR 1079 at the UAB, and project Res. 6860 UCSF in Santa Fe.2. 1 If theta bridging is introduced, it is not clear to us that the predictions of the TDH are of chance performance with (6c): el cazador "the hunter" appears post-verbally, and its movement appears to be string vacuous (although accompanied by overt V raising). So, perhaps the prediction should be, as in Dutch and German, of above chance performance. Above chance performance is only found for patient S3.3. 2 This argument carries over to the scrambled structures of Korean discussed in Beretta et al. Citation(2001). Note as well that it rests on the presupposition that the preposition by is spared, while it has been argued that at least some prepositions are affected in agrammatism—see Grodzinsky Citation(1988) and Friederici, Schönle, and Garret Citation(1982).4. 3 Some of the patients tested for Italian by Luzzatti et al. Citation(2001) also showed no comprehension problems. For Catalan, there is one case study, Peña-Casanova, Diéguez-Vide, Lluent, and Böhm Citation(2001), that reports some mild comprehension problems with passives on the part of the speaker tested. At this point, we can only account for the contrast between these cases and those reported for most Broca's aphasics as an effect of varying severity.5. 4 Note that a default strategy is also adopted by Grillo (Citation2008, Citation2009).
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-10
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 6
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