A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF VERB INFLECTIONS IN AGRAMMATISM (ICELANDIC, HINDI, FINNISH, MORPHOLOGY, APHASIA)

Agrammatism, which typically involves impairment in grammatical morphemes, has been difficult to characterize on the basis of English data due to the large number of uninflected forms and the opacity of underdetermined inflections. The study of agrammatics who are speakers of languages in which grammatical morphemes bear distinct and overt structural marking provides insight into the nature of this morphosyntactic deficit.

Verb phrases produced in narrative discourse from five agrammatic aphasics--two Icelandic, one Hindi, and two Finnish speakers, are examined with regard to verb form and function. Patterns of impairment in inflectional morphology in both bound and free grammatical morphemes are described. Verb phrase structure and lexical composition of the aphasic and matched normal control corpora are compared.

Findings in Icelandic are characterized in terms of the dimension of degree of finiteness. Icelandic agrammatic productions typically involved erroneous finite forms and substitutions of non-finite forms for finite forms. Difficulty with the irregular conjugational paradigms and complex inflectional requirements of Icelandic accounts for the pattern of findings in this conservative Germanic language.

Findings in Hindi are characterized by the dimension of degree of nominalization. The Hindi agrammatic's productions tended to contain more stative verb forms substituted for active verb forms. The lexical nature of this verb-final language account for the characteristics of the morphosyntactic impairment.

The Finnish agrammatic impairment was distinguished by verb omission, rather than morphologically erroneous productions. The underlying inflectional impairment is expressed as lexical omission due to the synthetic morphophonemic properties of this agglutinative language.

"Vector" verbs were differentially affected in Icelandic and Hindi relative to their syntactic role, being spared in the former and severely impaired in the latter. Difficulty with free grammatical morphemes, equally affecting the auxiliary and copula, is evident in all three languages.

Thus, the different patterns of agrammatic impairment in bound inflectional verb morphology found in Icelandic, Hindi and Finnish reflect language-specific distinctions in the status of these bound morphemes. The pattern of impairment in free grammatical morphemes was similar in all cases. Typological distinctions in the expression of verb phrase impairments are categorized by the dimensions of finiteness and nominalization.