Open AccessThe Cartography of Ibero-Romance Agrammatic Deficits
Author(s) -
Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
biolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1450-3417
DOI - 10.5964/bioling.8805
Subject(s) - catalan , reinterpretation , romance languages , romance , pruning , tree (set theory) , linguistics , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , philosophy , mathematics , biology , mathematical analysis , psychoanalysis , agronomy , aesthetics
This paper aims at examining whether grammatical errors produced by Broca’s aphasics are a consequence of a selective impairment of functional categories in three closely related Ibero-Romance languages — Catalan, Galician, and Spanish — for which almost no work had hitherto been done. In addition, a reinterpretation will be proposed under cartographical terms (Cinque 1999, 2002, 2006, Belletti 2004, Rizzi 2004) of previous structural neurolinguistic models of agrammatic production, more specifically the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann 1994, Friedmann & Grodzinsky 1997, and subsequent work). Cartography has been applied to the field of language variation. However, the present article constitute a completely new use. Since the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis was based on a model of monolithic nodes, the application of the cartographic tree structure provides us with further insights about the degree of structural preservation or damage of functional categories.