Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1988, Side 125

Málstol og málfrœðistol
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Menn, Lise, & Loraine K. Obler (ritstj.).1990. Agrammatic Aphasia. A Cross-Lan-
guage Narrative Sourcebook. 1-3. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Sigríður Magnúsdóttir & Höskuldur Þráinsson [Thráinsson]. 1990. Agrammatism in
Icelandic: Two Case Studies. Lise Menn & Loraine K. Obler (ritstj.):443-543.
Slobin, Dan I., Mette Kunde, David Stringer, Robin Campbell, Roger Wales, Roman
Jalcobson, Sven Lange. 1980. Mál og máltaka. [Greinasafn.] Indríði Gíslason
og Jón Gunnarsson önnuðust útgáfuna. Iðunn, Reykjavík.
Vanier, Marie, & David Caplan. 1990. CT-Scan Correlates of Agrammatism. Lise
Menn & Loraine K. Obler (ritstj.):37—114.
Summary
This pap>er discusses aphasia in general and the relations of its two main types
t0 damages of different areas of the brain. It then reports on some findings on
agrammatism in two Icelandic patients. The data were collected in connection with
Ihe research project „Cross-Language Aphasia Study“ (CLAS) which included 14
languages and was directed by Lise Menn, Loraine K. Obler and Harold Goodglass
°f the Boston VA Medical Center.
The main result reported on in this paper is that in Icelandic the fate of free and
bound grammatical morphemes (e.g. prepositions and infinitival markers on the one
hand and inflectional endings on the other) seems to be quite different. Whereas free
grammatical morphemes are frequently omitted, it appears that bound grammatical
morphemes almost never are. Instead, we find substitution of bound grammatical
morphemes when Icelandic agrammatic patients make inflectional errors. This is of
considerable theoretical importance since it has frequently been assumed that bound
grammatical morphemes tend to be omitted just as well as free ones in agramm-
atic speech. The reason seems to be that in langUages like English, for instance, it
is frequently impossible to tell whether a bound grammatical morpheme has been
omitted or whether the patient has substituted a form which has a zero-morpheme
(such as nom.sg. of nouns or infinitive of verbs in English). In Icelandic, however,
zero morphemes are not so common and hence it is much easier to tell the difference
between omission and substitution of bound grammatical morphemes. Then it tums
°ut that omission of bound grammatical morphemes almost never occurs, at least
n°t in mild to moderately severe agrammatism.
Omissions of the infinitival marker, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, artic-
les and lexical verbs are most common (in this order) and all of these involve the
whole word. Substitutions (of inflectional endings or the whole word) are most frequ-
ent in articles (heavily inflected in Icelandic), nouns, preopositions, lexical verbs,
Pronouns, auxiliary verbs, adjectives and conjunctions in this order.