on the relation between structural case, determiners, and verbs in ism a study of hebrew and dutch

8/14/2019 On the Relation Between Structural Case, Determiners, And Verbs in ism A Study of Hebrew and Dutch

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On the relation between structural case, determiners, and

verbs in agrammatism: A study of Hebrew and Dutch

Esther Ruigendijk

Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany

Naama Friedmann

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Background: This study explored the relation between the production of determinersand case markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism.Determiners and case markers require case and therefore depend on the existence ofcase-assigning constituents.Aims: Since verbs and verb inflections are case assigners, and are impaired inagrammatism, we tested whether the presence of verbs and verb inflection affects theproduction of determiners and case markers in Dutch and Hebrew agrammatism.Methods & Procedures: A total of 11 Hebrew-speaking and 8 Dutch-speakingindividuals with agrammatism participated in picture description and sentenceelicitation tasks, and their spontaneous speech was analysed.Outcomes & Results: The production of case-related morphemes was closely connectedto the presence of a case assigner in the sentence. In Hebrew, object case was produced

correctly 98% of the time, and always when a transitive verb was present in the sentence.In Dutch the production of determiners on the subject was related to the presence of afinite verb. The production of complete object noun phrases related to the presence of atransitive verb.Conclusions: The results indicate that case itself, as well as determiners and casemarkers, which depend on case, are not impaired in agrammatic production. Theapparent deficit is rather tightly related to the deficit in verbs and verb inflection. Thissuggests that the production of determiners and pronouns should be treated withinsentence context, in which a special emphasis should be given to the production ofcorrectly inflected verbs.

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia encounter difficulties in the production of

grammatical morphemes such as determiners, case markers, and verb inflection, and

often their sentences lack verbs. Recent studies show that not all grammatical

morphemes are equally susceptible to impairment and that the pattern of omission

Address correspondence to: Esther Ruigendijk, Carl von Ossietzky Universitat, Fak. III, Institut fur

Fremdsprachenphilologien, Ammerlander Heerstr. 114-118, 26111 Oldenburg, Germany.

E-mail: [email protected]

The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School

of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and

Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by a university grant for theencouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data, and to Roelien

Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper.

APHASIOLOGY, 2008, 22 (9), 948969


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and substitution is determined by linguistic constraints (De Bleser & Luzzatti, 1994;

Friedmann, 1994, 2001, 2006; Grodzinsky, 1990; Hagiwara, 1995; Ruigendijk, van

Zonneveld, & Bastiaanse, 1999). In this study we explore the relations among the

impaired morphemes, specifically the relation between the production of determi-

ners, pronouns, and case markers on the one hand, and verbs and verb inflections onthe other.

Agrammatic speakers omit and substitute determiners, and produce only a small

number of pronouns in their free speech (see e.g., Menn & Obler, 1990; Nespoulous

et al., 1988; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002; Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 1989).

Linguistically, pronouns and noun phrases with determiners have something in

common: both need case, a syntactic mechanism that marks syntactic roles such as

subject and object in the sentence (for a detailed explanation of case see the next

section, What is case?). The main question we asked in this study was whether

grammatical case is impaired in agrammatism, or whether what seems to be

impairment in case, manifesting in omissions of case markers and determiners forexample, should actually be ascribed to a deficit in another component of syntactic

ability that influences case.

Specifically, we examine a hypothesis that case in itself is not impaired in

agrammatism. The impaired production of morphemes related to case, such as case

markers, determiners, and pronouns in agrammatism is related to a deficit in the

production of verb and verb inflection, which assign case. In order to describe the

syntactic requirements for case assignment, the next sections present a brief linguistic

background regarding case in general, case in agrammatism, and case in Hebrew and

Dutch in particular, after which we describe the experimental investigation and the

results.

LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND

What is case?

Case is a mechanism that specifies the syntactic relationship between, for example, a

verb and the subject and object. It marks the function of each noun phrase in the

sentence. The subject receives nominative case, and the object usually receives

accusative case.1 Since the Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986),it is assumed that every pronounced noun phrase must have (exactly one) case. This

requirement is called the case filter. A sentence with a noun phrase that has not been

assigned case is thus ungrammatical. For example, a sentence like *I am proud my

students (Chomsky, 1995, p. 113) is ungrammatical because my students does not

receive case.

According to Chomsky (1981, 1986), all languages have case. In some languages,

like Russian and Hungarian, case is overtly realised on nouns and pronouns. In some

other languages, such as Chinese, case is invisible. In other languages, it is sometimes

realised morphologically while at other times it remains invisible, as in the languages

under discussion in this study: Hebrew and Dutch. Even when case is invisible, it is

CASE IN AGRAMMATIC PRODUCTION 949


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assumed to be there on an abstract level. When we use the term case in this study, we

refer to this syntactic notion of abstract case that is present in all languages. The

assignment of case to the subject and the object, which is the topic of the current

study, is dependent on the structural position of these noun phrases in relation to the

verb and the inflection and is therefore called structural (or syntactic) case(Chomsky, 1981).2,3

Noun phrases get their case from a case assigner. Nominative case is assigned to a

noun phrase in subject position by verb inflection, accusative is assigned by the verb

to its object. This study thus explored these case assignersverbs and verb

inflection. Verbs and verb inflection play a major part in the agrammatic deficit, as

illustrated in the introduction, and we surmised that the deficit in determiners and

pronouns might be related to the deficit in verb production.

In a simple subject-verb-object sentence, such as (1a), the modal will (or, in

other sentences, the inflection of the verb) assigns nominative case to the subject

noun phrase the man. The transitive verb meet assigns accusative case to the

object the boy. In this example in English, abstract case is assigned to the noun

phrases, but it is not visible. Case becomes visible in English when pronouns are

used. As seen in (1b), the subject he has nominative case, whereas the object him

has accusative case.

(1) a. The man will meet the boy.

NOM ACC

b. He will meet him.

Thus, subjects depend on the presence of the finite inflection of a verb, whereas

objects depend on the presence of a transitive verb. Subjects will not receive case if

there is no finite verb, and objects will not receive case if there is no transitive verb

(for objects the verb does not need to be finite). When the subject or the object do

not receive case, the case filter will be violated. One constraint on the case filter was

suggested by Ouhalla (1993). According to Ouhalla, the case filter applies only to

complete noun phrases such as nouns with a determiner and pronouns. Importantly

for the current study, noun phrases without a determiner can be caseless.

Case in agrammatism

Several empirical investigations of the production of case-related morphemes4 in

agrammatism have yielded an unclear pattern of results. Some indicate the preservation

2 Case can also be lexically specified, and then it is called inherent (or lexical) case. For the study of

inherent case assignment, languages that show a clear distinction between inherent and structural case

assignment, like German or Russian, are more interesting (see Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002, and

Ruigendijk, 2002, for a study of these languages). When we speak about case here, we always mean

structural case.3 But see, for instance, Landau (2006) for an alternative analysis of case.4 Case-related morphemes can be bound or free In Russian and Standard Arabic for example case is

950 RUIGENDIJK AND FRIEDMANN


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of the production of case-related morphemes (De Bleser, Bayer, & Luzzatti, 1996;

Jarema & Kadzielawa, 1990; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002), while others report a

deficit in case-related morphemes, manifested in the overuse of the default form (which

is nominative in the languages that were examined, i.e., Russian and Serbo-Croatian,

see Luria, 1976, and Zei & Sikic, 1990). The aim of the current study is to assess theconditions in which case is impaired in agrammatism.

One suggestion for the description of the syntactic deficit in agrammatism is

the tree-pruning hypothesis (TPH, Friedmann, 2001, 2002, 2006; Friedmann &

Grodzinsky, 1997). According to the TPH, the deficit of individuals with

agrammatism is related to the projection of the syntactic tree up to its highest

nodes. This results in impaired production of structures and grammatical

morphemes that involve high nodes, whereas structures that involve only low

nodes remain intact. Crucially for the current study, tense inflection of the verb,

which is associated with the high part of the tree, is impaired in the speech

production of many agrammatic speakers,5 when the verb cannot move to highnodes to get tense inflection. As a result, the verb is often produced either in a

non-finite form rather than a finite formas is the case in Germanic languages

and in a low node, namely in sentence-final position (Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998;

Kolk & Heeschen, 1992; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002), or it is produced in the

wrong tense inflection, as in other languages such as Hebrew and Arabic

(Friedmann, 2000, 2001, 2006).6 Frequent verb omissions are also explained in

this framework. Individuals with agrammatism produce fewer verbs than non-

brain-damaged speakers (Luzzatti et al., 2002; Saffran et al., 1989). This was

found to be closely related to the position of the verb on the syntactic tree, as

more verbs are omitted when the verb should have been produced in a high node

(Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld, 1998; Friedmann, 2000, 2006; Friedmann & Gil,

2001; Friedmann, Gvion, Biran, & Novogrodsky, 2006). So when verbs have to

move to pruned nodes on the syntactic tree, they either do not move and then

appear with the wrong tense inflection and in a different sentential position, or

they get omitted. In the current study we explore the possibility that the deficit in

tense inflection and the omission of verbs cause a deficit in syntactic case, because

tense inflection and verbs are necessary to assign case. Specifically, we will

examine the realisation of nominative case, the case of the subject, which is

assigned by the verb inflection, and of accusative case, the case usually assignedby the verb to its object.

Importantly, there is an additional side to this generalisation. Given that

according to the TPH only structures that involve the high nodes are impaired in

agrammatism, case that is assigned (or checked) in low nodes should be intact.

Because object case is assigned in low nodes, it is not expected to be impaired

under the TPH assumptions, that is, when the case-assigning verb has been

realised.

5 There are different degrees of severity in agrammatism. The individuals who are impaired at the tense

phrase (TP) level have tense impairment and no impairment in agreement. Those who are impaired aboveTP are not impaired in either tense or agreement (for a description of degrees of severity see Friedmann,

2001 2005)



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Given these considerations, we suggest the preserved case hypothesis, which we

will examine in the present study.

The Preserved Case HypothesisMorphemes that depend on case and case assignment are not directly impaired in

agrammatism. Impaired production of case and case-related elements in a sentence

is a by-product of an impairment in related syntactic domains.

Recent results from Dutch and German agrammatism support this hypothesis.

Ruigendijk et al. (1999) demonstrated that the production of determiners and

pronouns in Dutch and German was related to the production of a case assigner,

such as a (finite) verb or a preposition. Individuals with agrammatism could

produce determiners and pronouns in spontaneous speech when a case assigner

was realised; when no case assigner was present, they tended to omit determiners

or produced determiners and pronouns in the default nominative case. Similarresults were found for German speakers with agrammatism in spontaneous speech

as well as in several production tasks (Ruigendijk, 2002; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse,

2000, 2002).

CASE IN HEBREW AND DUTCH, AND SPECIFIC PREDICTIONS

Hebrew

In Hebrew case is visible on definite object noun phrases and on pronouns.

Nominative case is not marked overtly. Accusative case on objects is marked with

the free morpheme et, which appears before the object. Only definite noun phrases

can occur with the accusative marker (Berman, 1978; Danon, 2001, 2006; Shlonsky,

1997), as shown in the examples in (2) and (3). Definite noun phrases are either

marked with the definite article ha- (2a), with bound possession marking (2b), as a

part of a construct state nominal in which the complement of the head noun is

definite (2c), or as a proper name (2d), and also before the demonstrative pronoun

ze, this (2e) (examples 2ae are grammatical and are taken from the speech of

participants in this study).

(2) a. ha-yeled xipes et ha-kadur

the-child searched ACC the-ball

The child looked for the ball

b. hikarti et kol-ex

recognised-1st.sg.past ACC voice-your

I recognised your voice

c. Yakov shama et neum rosh ha-memshala

Jacob heard ACC speech-head-the-government

Jacob heard the prime ministers speech

d. gvina cehuba mazkira li et holand

cheese yellow reminds to-me ACC NetherlandsYellow cheese reminds me of the Netherlands

if t t ?



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With indefinite objects, the accusative marker is not allowed in Hebrew, and

according to Danon (2006) indefinite objects in Hebrew lack case altogether.

Therefore a sentence that contains an indefinite object is grammatical without a case

marker (3a) and is ungrammatical with an accusative marker (3b).

(3) a. Ha-yeled xipes kadur

the-child searched ball

b. * Ha-yeled xipes et kadur

the-child searched ACC ball

Dutch

In Dutch as in English, case is visible on pronouns only (e.g., ik vs mij, I vs me

or hijvs hem, he vs him). Determiners are not marked for case, only for number

and gender. All singular count nouns obligatorily take a determiner (and therefore

4a is grammatical but 4b is not), except for mass nouns and plural count nouns,

which do not require a determiner (see 4c, 4d), and incorporate nouns, which must

occur without a determiner (4e).

(4) a. Ik kocht een broodje kaas

I bought a roll cheese

I bought a cheese roll

b. * Ik drink graag glaasje wijn

I drink gladly glass wine

I like to drink glass of wine

c. Ik vind (deze) kaas erg lekker

I think (this) cheese very nice

I like (this) cheese very much

d. Ik vind (deze) broodjes kaas lekker

I think (these) rolls cheese nice

I like (these) cheese rolls

e. De jongen houdt van auto rijden

The boy likes car driving

The boy likes car driving

Although Dutch determiners are not marked for case, it is assumed that their

realisation depends on having case, and thus on the presence of a case assigner

(following Ouhalla, 1993).

According to the Preserved Case Hypothesis, it is expected that agrammatic

speakers will be able to produce case-dependent morphemes such as case markers

and determiners as long as they have the proper syntactic preconditions. Given these

properties of case assignment in Hebrew and Dutch, for Hebrew this means that if a

transitive verb is produced, and the object is definite, an accusative case marker

should appear. For Dutch this means that if a finite verb is present, complete subjectnoun phrases can be realised, and if a transitive verb is present, complete object noun

h i h h i h h i d h



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no case assigner there will be more omissions than when a case assigner (a verb or

verb inflection) exists.

Testing two structurally different languages like Hebrew and Dutch thus allowed

us to test different aspects of our hypothesis. In Hebrew, where definite articles are

not obligatory but where an overt accusative marker for definite objects exists, wetested the relationship between the presence of a transitive verb for definite objects

and the accusative marker. We expected that, if the presence of a case assigner is a

critical factor, definite objects should appear more often with than without

accusative marker in the presence of a transitive verb. In Dutch we tested the

production of complete noun phrases. We investigated the relationship between the

presence of a nominative case-assigning finite verb and completeness of the subject

noun phrase and between an accusative case assigning transitive verb and

completeness of the object noun phrase. If the presence of a case assigner is indeed

a critical factor in the production of a complete noun phrase, we expect a higher rate

of complete-to-incomplete noun phrases when a case assigner is present than when acase assigner is not present.

EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION

Case in Hebrew

Participants. A total of 11 Hebrew-speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia

participated in the Hebrew part of the study. They all had non-fluent aphasia, and were

diagnosed with Brocas aphasia with agrammatism by the neuropsychological batteriesused in Israeli rehabilitation centresthe Hebrew versions of the WAB (Kertesz, 1982;

Hebrew version by Soroker, 1997), the PALPA (Kay, Lesser, & Coltheart, 1992;

Hebrew version by Gil & Edelstein, 2001), and the BAFLA battery for assessment of

syntactic abilities (Friedmann, 1998), and by clinical workup. All participants had a

lesion in the left cerebral hemisphere and were right-handed. Their mean age was 39

years 6 months (SD5 17.1), and mean years of education 12 years 5 months. All

patients had characteristic agrammatic speech: non-fluent and short incomplete

utterances, reduction of sentence structure, and tense inflection errors. They produced

very few, if any, well-formed Wh-questions, relative clauses, or sentential complements,

and they could not repeat sentences with verb movement to second position, omittingthe verb or leaving it in a position after the subject (see Friedmann, 2005, for a detailed

description of their syntactic abilities). Eight of the participants also had severe

impairment in tense inflection. Participants MA, ML, and IE had relatively spared TP.

Crucially all of them had unimpaired production of agreement inflection, indicating

that at least the lower part of the syntactic tree was available for them. Only patients

who had at least two-word utterances were included in the study.

Method. To assess the use of accusative markers with verbs and definite and

indefinite object noun phrases, we used analysis of spontaneous speech as well as

elicitation of sentences. Spontaneous speech was collected and analysed for sixparticipants; the rest of the participants did not produce enough spontaneous speech

d d l h i h bj d



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figure that performs an action on another (an example is given in Figure 1). Four of

these seven individuals also participated in an additional task, in which they were

asked to produce a sentence with a given inflected verb (e.g., Say a sentence with the

word fixed.). This elicitation task included 100 verbs, 20 of which were transitive

verbs (and the rest were verbs that take sentential complements and intransitive

verbs: unaccusatives, reflexives, and unergatives, which were not analysed for thecurrent study except for four cases in which the participants produced a sentence

with accusative case as a response). Only sentences that included an object noun

phrase were included in the analysis, and responses that did not include an object

were excluded (for example, for the picture given in Figure 1, one of the participants

said Ha-tarnegolet mistareket The chicken combs-self instead of The girl combs

the chicken, using the reflexive instead of the target transitive verb, so this response

was not included in the analysis). Two individuals participated both in the

spontaneous speech analysis and in the elicitation tests.

The elicited speech and the spontaneous speech were tape-recorded and

transcribed. If the patients corrected themselves, only the last attempt utterancewas analysed.

The different syntactic properties of Hebrew compared to Dutch allowed us to run

a different type of analysis for Hebrewrecall that Hebrew includes an overt

accusative case marker, et, which appears before definite objects. This allowed us to

directly test the appearance of an accusative case marker in the context of definite

objects, and whether they appeared only when a verb was present. Recall also that

Hebrew does not have an indefinite article, and indefinite objects appear bare,

without a determiner; thus Hebrew sentences in which both the determiner and the

accusative marker are absent are perfectly grammatical, and do not necessarily

indicate omission of the accusative marker or of definiteness markers. Therefore weonly tested the appearance of accusative case markers with respect to definite

bj d i d i i hi h h bj i d fi i d

Figure 1. An example of a picture used in the Hebrew sentence elicitation task The girl combs the

chicken.



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perfectly grammatical, and therefore could not be used in the analysis to indicate a

case problem as they do in Dutch.

Thus, the main question for Hebrew was whether each time a definite object

occurs in the sentence it is preceded by the accusative marker, and whether each time

an accusative case marker occurs, it occurs before a definite object. Then thequestion was whether these objects appeared when a verb was realised in the

sentence. For these aims, sentences with definite objects were collected from both

spontaneous speech and the elicitation tests. For each definite object it was

determined whether it appeared after the obligatory the accusative case marker or

not. In addition, all sentences with an accusative case marker were analysed to test

whether accusative case marker occurred only before definite objects.

Finally we examined whether object noun phrases with accusative case marking

were produced in the presence of a case-assigning transitive verb. In the sentence-to-

verb construction task the verb was given to the participant so, naturally, the two

other tasksthe elicitation with the pictures and the spontaneous speech analysis

were more informative with respect to the production of the verb.

Hebrew results. The Hebrew-speaking participants presented excellent ability in

their use of the accusative case marker et. A summary of the results of the Hebrew

experiment is given in Table 1 (see Appendix A for individual data).

The data for the spontaneous speech and for the elicitation tasks were similar (the

rate of correct and incorrect responses in both tasks did not differ significantly, using

Mann Whitney, z5 1.14, p5 .25), and the statistical analysis therefore collapsed the

data together for the two individuals who participated in both spontaneous speech

and elicitation tasks. The participants produced a total of 319 definite objects. Most

of these definite objects (98%) were produced correctly with an accusative marker.

The accusative marker was omitted only before six definite objects one proper

name, one construct state nominal, and four nouns with a definite article, one of

them following a long pause. We used the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks

Test for comparisons with an alpha level of .05. The difference between definite objects

with accusative case marker and definite objects without accusative case marker was

significant, T5 0, p, .001. In only five sentences was the accusative marker

erroneously used before an indefinite object noun phrase (this happened significantly

less than using the accusative marker correctly before a definite object noun; T5

0,p, .001). In one sentence the accusative marker was substituted by a preposition.

Importantly, all 313 definite object noun phrases with an accusative marker were

produced in sentences with a case assigning transitive verb.

TABLE 1

Hebrew: Number of definite and indefinite object noun phrases with and without accusative

case marker in spontaneous speech and in elicited sentence production task

Accusative+

definite NP No accusative+

definite NP Accusative+

indefinite NP

S t h ( 6) 94 2 1



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Case in Dutch

Participants. Eight Dutch-speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia (mean

age 60 years 1 month) participated in the study. They were right-handed and aphasic

due to a single stroke in the left hemisphere. All patients were at least a year post-

onset and had been diagnosed with agrammatic Brocas aphasia using a standard

assessment battery (Dutch version of the Aachen Aphasia Test; Graetz, De Bleser, &

Willmes, 1992). The type of aphasia was confirmed by two aphasiologists.

The speech production of all patients was agrammatic, and their speech was

characterised by problems with finiteness of the verbs and/or a low number of verbs,

relatively few pronouns, and omission of determiners. Their spontaneous speech

included no Wh-questions or embedded sentences.

Procedure. A picture description task was devised to elicit sentences (developed byJonkers, 1998). The picture descriptions were taken from Jonkers (1998). This task

consisted of 30 pictures depicting an action representing a transitive verb (See

Figure 2 for an example for a picture used for the verb aaien, to pet). The patients

were asked to describe in one sentence what was happening in the picture.

The elicited speech was tape-recorded and transcribed. If the patients corrected

themselves, only the last attempt utterance was analysed. For each item it was

established whether a verb was produced and which syntactic roles (subject and/or

object) were realised, and whether they were realised as complete noun phrases. The

complete noun phrases in our analysis included nouns with a determiner, mass



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nouns, bare plural count nouns7 and pronouns, or as incomplete noun phrases

bare nouns that should have a determiner but were produced without one.

The subject noun phrases were divided into three groups: subjects that occurred in

a sentence with a case assigning finite verb (5a), subjects with a non-finite verb (5b),

and subjects without a verb (5c).

(5) a. Subject with a finite verb:

Target: De man maait het gras

The man mows the grass

Response: De man maait

The man mows

b. Subject with a non-finite verb:

Target: De man maait het gras

The man mows the grass.

Response: Die kerel dat gras aan het maaien.

That fellow that grass on the mow (5mowing).

c. Subject without a verb:

Target: De vrouw veegt de straat

The woman sweeps the street

Response: vrouwstraat

womanstreet

(6) a. Object with a verb:

Target: De vrouw veegt de stoep

The woman sweeps the pavement.

Response: De straat vegen

The street sweep-infinitiveb.Object without a verb:

Target: De jongen aait de hond.

The boy pets the dog.

Response: Jongen hond, lieve hond

Boy dog, sweet dog

For the objects we analysed whether a verb was produced in the sentence or not

(6a and b). Subsequently, all objects with a case-assigning verb were divided into two

groups: objects with a finite verb and objects with a non-finite verb. This was done to

evaluate whether verb presence or verb finiteness was the important factor for the

production of complete noun phrases. Finally, we also counted how many subjects

and objects were not realised and how many finite or non-finite verbs were produced

in isolation, i.e., without any arguments.

Apart from the elicited sentence production data, we analysed spontaneous speech

production of each patient with respect to the production of complete and

incomplete subject and object noun phrases. The spontaneous speech production

came from the interviews that were part of the AAT and included questions like

Could you tell me how your speech problems started?, and Could you tell me

something about your job/ family/ hobbies?. These samples consisted of 175480

7 Mass nouns and plural count nouns do not need a determiner in languages like English and Dutch.

According to Longobardi (1994) these noun phrases should still be analysed as DPs (cf Abney 1987); that



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words per participant. To be able to determine whether a noun phrase or a pronoun

was used as an object or a subject, only spontaneous utterances with a verb (finite or

non-finite) were analysed. Fixed expressions (e.g., weet ik niet, I dont know) were

excluded from the analysis. For each utterance, it was established whether a verb was

produced and which syntactic roles (subject and/or object) were realised, and

whether they were realised as complete noun phrases or as incomplete noun phrases.We used the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test for all comparisons, with

an alpha level of .05 for all statistical tests.

Dutch results. The results of the Dutch elicitation study are presented in Tables 2

and 3. Table 2 presents the number of subject noun phrases in the various conditions,

and Table 3 presents the distribution of object noun phrases (see Appendix B for

individual data). We analysed 201 of the responses to the pictures (83.8%); of these

39 (16.2%) could not be analysed with respect to subject and object production due

to zero reactions (I dont know), perseverations, paraphasias, or circumlocutions.

None of these included a verb that described the action on the picture even roughly.In total, only 57.9% of the 201 analysable utterances contained a finite verb, which

was always realised in the second position as is obligatory in Dutch matrix clauses,

17.1% included a non-finite verb, and in 8.8% no verb was realised.

In total, 171 subject noun phrases and 119 object noun phrases were produced. The

patients produced more subjects than objects due to the fact that some of the verbs could

also be used without an object. About half of the subjects were pronouns; all subject

pronouns appeared in the nominative case as required. No case errors were made on the

pronouns. No object pronouns were produced. Of all nouns with a determiner (n5146),

only two nouns appeared with an incorrect determiner, both due to a gender error.

Significantly more complete subject noun phrases than subject noun phraseswithout a determiner were produced when the relevant case assigner, a finite verb,

was present, T5 0, p5 .008. When the verb in the sentence was non-finite, there was

no difference between the number of complete subject noun phrases and subject

noun phrases without a determiner, T5 4, p5 .22. No significant difference was

found between the number of complete subject noun phrases and incomplete subject

noun phrases also when there was no verb at all, T5 2, p5 .18 (see Table 2).

A total of 69 of the subjects were realised as a pronoun. The majority of these

pronouns were produced in the presence of a finite verb (65 out of 69). Only three of

these pronouns were produced with a non-finite verb and only one was produced

without a verb. The completeness of objects was also found to depend on the verbs, butthis time on the existence rather than on the finiteness of the verbs (see Tables 3 and 4).

TABLE 2

Dutch: Number of complete and incomplete subject noun phrases in relation to the presence of

a case assigning finite verb

Complete Incomplete

Finite verb 128 (97%) 4 (3%)

Non-finite verb 14 (73%) 5 (27%)

No verb 13 (65%) 7 (35%)



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but these cases were too few to reach significance (Because of the number of ties, the

Wilcoxon test could not be used. A chi-square test yielded x252.94, p5 .08.)

Table 3 shows that, unlike for subjects, and in line with the predictions the finiteness

of the verb did not play a role in the realisation of case on objects (as manifested by

determiner production). When the verb was finite, 80% of the objects were complete

noun phrases; when the verb was non-finite, 78% of the objects were complete. Thus,

for both the finite and non-finite verbs, the majority of the object nouns were complete,

with no significant difference between finite and non-finite verbs with respect to the rate

of complete noun phrases (x25 0.05, p5 .83: chi-square for the group was run insteadof Wilcoxon here because four participants did not produce any object in one of the

conditions). This means that for the production of complete object noun phrases, the

existence of a case-assigning transitive verb, rather than verb finiteness, is needed.

The analysis of the spontaneous speech data shows exactly the same pattern as the

data from the elicitation task. Whenever there was a finite verb, subjects were

realised as a complete noun phrase and not as an incomplete noun phrase (90 vs 0,

which is a significant difference, T5 0, p5 .02). In the corpus, subjects usually

appeared with a finite verb and therefore there were not enough instances of subjects

with a non-finite verb to allow for a comparison between complete and incomplete

noun phrases (there were only three such instances) or for a comparison between

complete noun phrase subjects with and without verb finiteness. When there was a

verb in the sentence, objects were realised as a complete noun phrase (n5 35)

significantly more times than as an incomplete noun phrase (n5 9), T5 0, p5 .02.

As in the elicitation task, finiteness did not play a role for the objects, and no

significant difference was found between the number of complete object noun

phrases with finite and non-finite verbs, T5 5, p5 .31. Furthermore, the rate of

complete object noun phrases was not significantly different between finite and non-

finite verbs, 85% and 72% respectively, x25 1, p5 .32.

DISCUSSION

h l f b h b d h i di h h d i f i lf i

TABLE 4

Dutch: The number of complete and incomplete objects in relation to the presence of finite and

non-finite verbs

Complete Incomplete

Finite verb 56 (80%) 14 (20%)

Non-finite verb 25 (78%) 7 (22%)

TABLE 3

Dutch: The total number of complete and incomplete objects in relation to the presence of their

case-assigning verb

Complete Incomplete

Verb 81 (79%) 21 (21%)

No verb 6 (35%) 11 (65%)



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results show that agrammatic speakers respect the syntactic principles of case (case

filter). The main findings of the study are that in Hebrew the accusative case marker is

unimpaired and is produced correctly for 98% of the definite object nouns. In Dutch

pronouns are never produced in a wrong case and determiners are produced correctly

whenever a case assigner is present. In most utterances, subjects are produced with adeterminer when a finite verb is present in the sentence, and objects are produced with a

determiner when a verb (irrespective of its finiteness) is present.

These findings have several implications. First, in line with the findings of de

Bleser et al. (1996) and Ruigendijk and Bastiaanse (2002) as well as with our

preserved case hypothesis, they indicate that case is unimpaired in agrammatic

production, and they add support for the general claim that not all grammatical

morphemes are impaired in agrammatism. These results also indicate that case,

determiners, inflection, and verbs are interrelated. The results from Hebrew indicate

a tight relation between case realisation and the production of the determiner, as in

98% of the sentences in which a determiner appeared on the object noun theaccusative case marker was produced, and in 98% of the sentences in which the case

marker was produced the object was definite. Furthermore, the results from both

Dutch and Hebrew demonstrate a close connection between the production of case-

assigning verbs and the production of determiners and case markers: In Hebrew,

object case markers appeared only in sentences that included a verb. In Dutch, the

large majority of the subjects in sentences that included a case-assigning finite verb,

and of objects in sentences that included a verb, was produced with a determiner.

So the most important finding here is that there was a significant difference

between sentences with a case assigner, in which much more noun phrases were

complete than incomplete, and sentences without a case assigner, in which this was

not true. When the conditions for case were meti.e., when the proper case assigner

was presentcase was realised on the noun phrases, and they appeared as complete

noun phrases significantly more often.

The results of the current study are readily explained by the combination of

current linguistic theory and theories of agrammatic production. According to

current syntactic theory, within the framework of transformational grammar and the

minimalist programme (Chomsky, 1995, 2000, 2001), the subject and the object

check their case with a case assigner. Subjects check their case against the tense of the

verb that is in the tense phrase (TP). Objects check their case against the verb on a lownode of the syntactic tree.8 Thus finiteness, or the tense inflection of the verb, as well as

the movement of the subject (and the verb) to TP are crucial for successful case

assignment to subjects, whereas for objects the verb itself, rather than its tense inflection,

is the crucial factor, and therefore movement to higher nodes is unnecessary.

8 Specifically: According to the minimalist programme (Chomsky, 1995), the case of the subject and the

object is checked in spec-head configuration of the noun phrase (DP) and the case assigner. That is to say,

the noun phrase is in the specifier position of the phrase, and the case assigner is at the head of the phrase.

Subject DPs raise to spec-TP to check their case against the verb and its tense, which are in T 0 (following

the movement of the verb from VP to T0). Objects check their case with the verb at AgroP according toChomsky (1995), or at the light v layer according to Chomsky (2000, 2001). Note that although several

different frameworks have been suggested for structural case such as assignment of case with and without



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When agrammatic speakers fail to move the verb and the subject to TP, the

checking of the subject case against the verb and its tense cannot take place, and

therefore when verbs do not move high up and are uninflected for tense (when they

are non-finite or omitted) case assignment to the subject fails and the determiner of

the subject is omitted. Objects, on the other hand, do not require movement to highnodes or tense inflection, only the existence of the verb is necessary for them. Thus,

when the verb is present in the sentence, even if it is non-finite and has not moved to

a high node, it can assign case to the object.

Verbs that cannot move to TP to check their tense inflection, or to CP, to which

the matrix verb moves in Germanic languages like Dutch (in order to be in the

second sentential position), are either omitted or left in a non-finite form in a low

node (which in Dutch and German is a sentence-final position, and in Hebrew the

position within VP after the subject) (Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld, 1998; Friedmann,

2000; Kolk & Heeschen, 1992). However, when the verb is omitted, the assignment

of object case is deficient, which in turn might lead to the production of incompleteobject noun phrases.

The relation between determiners and case or, more specifically, the reason for

determiner omission when case is not assigned, is related to the distinction between

complete noun phrases, such as noun phrases with a definite article or pronouns,

which are called determiner phrases (DPs) in Abneys (1987) terminology,9 and

incomplete noun phrases (NPs), noun phrases without a determiner. According to

Ouhalla (1993), the case filter applies to DPs rather than to NPs, and case is

actually a property of complete noun phrases, and not of incomplete noun phrases.

Thus, DPs in utterances with no suitable case assigner receive no case, and

therefore violate the case filter and are ungrammatical, but incomplete NPswithout a case assigner do not violate the case filter. This distinction between NPs

and DPs explains the omissions of determiners in our study, which occurred when

the subject or the object lacked case. When there is no case, a determiner cannot

appear because a caseless DP is ungrammatical. Therefore, an NP without a

determiner, which is not subjected to the case filter, is produced instead. These

results are in line with earlier studies that showed that the production of

determiners in German depends on the realisation of a case assigning verb

(Ruigendijk, 2002; Ruigendijk & Bastiaanse, 2002). Ruigendijk and Bastiaanse

(2002) show that German agrammatic speakers produce more complete than

incomplete noun phrases when a case assigner is realised, both in spontaneousspeech and in sentence-elicitation tasks. When the German individuals with

agrammatism do not realise a case assigner, they omit the determiner much more

often than they produce it. Interestingly, these data also emphasise why testing

Dutch is important. Whereas these findings on German have already shown the

strong relationship between determiner realisation and the presence of a case

assigner, they could also be argued to be related to morphological case, which is

shown on German determiners. The argumentation could then be that if no case

assigner is present, no morphological case can be determined, and therefore the

determiners morphological form remains unspecified, which might lead to

9 In the government and binding framework (e g Chomsky 1986) the noun was assumed to be the



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determiner omission. The results we have presented here from Dutch show that it

is the syntactic relationship between case assigners and noun phrases that is

important, rather than morphology. Since Dutch does not have morphological

case on determiners, there is no morphological reason for article omission here.10

This does not mean, however, that morphology does not play a role at all: firstresults from a close comparison of Dutch and German show that German speakers

omit determiners more often than Dutch speakers (Ruigendijk, 2007).

Recently, the results on Dutch have been replicated in a study in which the

spontaneous speech of eight Dutch-speaking agrammatic aphasic speakers has been

analysed with regard to the production and omission rates of determiners and

pronouns and, among other things, their relationship with the presence of a case

assigner (Ruigendijk & Baauw, 2007). Ruigendijk and Baauw (2007) also show that

many more complete noun phrases and pronouns are realised if a case assigner is

present than absent. They furthermore demonstrate that it is mainly this syntactic

factor of case assignment that affects the production and omission of determiners inagrammatic speech, whereas pragmatic factors (realising a definite or an indefinite

determiner) and lexical and semantic factors (i.e., gender of the determiner and

pronoun respectively) do not play a role.

The results of the current study thus strongly suggest that when there is a relevant

case assigner, T or V, the subject and object noun phrases (respectively) are

complete. A question remains regarding the other direction of the implication: the

finding that sometimes when no case assigner was present, the Dutch participants

still realised some complete noun phrases. How did these noun phrases receive case?

One possibility is thatat least for the subject noun phrasespatients can adopt a

strategy; so-called default case assignment. Default case assignment is an option that

has been proposed for normal elliptical utterances where structural case assignment

fails: if the subject does not check/receive its case from I, it gets nominative by

default (van Zonneveld, 1994). As was also suggested in Ruigendijk et al. (1999),

agrammatic speakers may be able to use this default option as a strategy when

normal case assignment fails. Notice, however, that this default strategy cannot be

the whole story, because there was a significant difference in the production of

complete subjects when the verb was finite compared to when it was not finite. Thus,

the presence of an appropriate case assigner in the sentence clearly made a difference,

over and above the default case. This default strategy cannot explain the six object

noun phrases that appeared with a determiner without a case-assigning verb.

Another problem for this default explanation is that it is not immediately clear at

what level default case is applied. According to van Zonneveld (1994) it is indeed an

alternative abstract case that is assigned if normal case assignment fails, and this

could explain the fact that some complete subject noun phrases occurred without a

proper case assigner without violating the case filter in our study. However, this

characterisation would render the case filter vacuous. Schutze (2001, p. 206)

therefore characterises default case as forms of a language [] that are used

to spell out nominal expressions (e.g., DPs) that are no associated with any case

feature assigned or otherwise determined by syntactic means. As such it ismorphological case that is neither necessary nor sufficient for satisfying the case

filter (Schutze 2001 p 208) The case filter is according to Schutze not



17/23

morphologically motivated, but a purely configurational requirement. When default

case is morphological case, it is unclear how it can be applied to Dutch determiners

that are not specified (any more) for morphological case.

Another possible explanation comes from the nature of the task that was used.

The patients were examined with a picture description task. And although they wereasked to describe the pictures in one sentence, they sometimes completely failed to

produce a sentence or even a fragment. Probably some of the patients still wanted to

describe the picture as well as possible within the limits of their impairment, and

simply started naming the objects and figures they saw in the picture. When naming

items in a picture in Dutch, it is possible to use a determiner in a deictic way (outside

a case assigning context; that is, these noun phrases do not have abstract case),

especially if both the patient and the experimenter are looking at the same picture,

which was the case in our study. Results from former studies in which spontaneous

speech was analysed support this explanation. The data in Ruigendijk et al. (1999)

and Ruigendijk and Baauw (2007) show that the number of incomplete noun phrasesin the speech of Dutch agrammatic speakers is (much) higher than the number of

complete noun phrases when no case assigner is present. In other words, when the

task does not allow for a naming strategy, the relationship with no case assigner is

clearer: when there is no case assigner there is no complete noun phrase.

However, the more important finding is that as soon as a case assigner is present

many more complete than incomplete noun phrases are realised. This close relation

between a case assigner and the determiner has also been reported for another type

of case assigner: prepositions. De Roo (1995) showed that Dutch-speaking

agrammatic patients almost never omit determiners from within a prepositional

phrase (they do not omit the from the PP in-the-garden), although they omitdeterminers that do not appear in a PP approximately 20% of the time (de Roo did

not analyse these omitted determiners with respect to whether or not a verb existed in

the sentence). Ruigendijk (2002) showed that German- and Dutch-speaking

agrammatic patients produced virtually no incomplete noun phrases on a noun

phrase insertion task in which the preposition was provided. Given that prepositions

are case assigners, these findings constitute further support for the claim that

determiners are not omitted when a case assigner is present.

To summarise, the causal chain that leads to determiner omissions, even though

case and determiners themselves are unimpaired, unfolds in the following way. An

impairment in syntactic structure building, causes difficulties in the movement ofverbs to TP and CP, and therefore in many sentences the verb is either omitted, left

uninflected, or appears in a wrong inflection at a low node. When a verb is omitted

case cannot be assigned to either the subject or the object; a verb that has not moved

to TP cannot assign case to the subject. When the subject or the object are caseless,

they cannot be complete noun phrases because complete noun phrases require case,

and therefore they appear only as incomplete noun phrases; that is, noun phrases

without a determiner. This leads to determiner omissions.

The results have interesting implications for the treatment of individuals with

agrammatism. They indicate that training the production of isolated noun phrases to

improve determiner and/or case marker production will not be enough, since thedeterminers and case markers are related to case assignersverbs. Instead, the



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the production of complete noun phrasesnamely the production of determiners

and case. Results of a study performed by Springer, Huber, Schlenck, and Schlenk

(2000) support this clinical direction. Springer et al. found that in some of their

severely agrammatic patients the production of complete noun phrases increased

after treating these patients with a programme that aimed at the production of(infinite) verbs combined with noun phrases (note, however, that treatment that

ignores verb inflection will be inefficient with respect to the case of subjects).

Furthermore, treatment programmes that are aimed at improving the accessibility of

high syntactic nodes (such as TP and CP, see Friedmann, Wenkert-Olenik, & Gil,

2000; Shapiro & Thompson, 2006) should also affect the production of determiners

and case markers by increasing the rate of verb production and inflection production

by allowing movement to high nodes.

Manuscript received 31 August 2007

Manuscript accepted 28 November 2007First published online 27 May 2008

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APPENDIX A: INDIVIDUAL DATA HEBREW

APPENDIX B: INDIVIDUAL DATA DUTCH

TABLE A1

Object noun phrases with and without an accusative marker: Spontaneous speech

Accusative+ definite NP No accusative+ definite NP Accusative+ indefinite NP

AL 12 0 0

RA 8 0 0

RN 11 0 0

IE 5 0 0

RS 34 1 1

GR 24 1 0

Total 94 2 1

TABLE A2

Object noun phrases with and without the accusative marker: Sentence elicitation tasks

Accusative+ definite NP No accusative+ definite NP Accusative+ indefinite NP

AL 43 2 1

RA 48 0 0

HY 15 0 1

ML 31 0 1

SB 60 1 1

MA 5 0 0AE 17 1 0

Total 219 4 4

TABLE B1

Subject DPs (complete noun phrases) and NPs (incomplete noun phrases) with a finite verb, a

non-finite verb and without a verb

Subjects

With finite verb

With non-finite

verb Without a verb Total

subjects

Omitted

subjects

Participant DP NP DP NP DP NP

1 15 0 1 0 2 0 18 4

2 22 0 4 0 3 0 29 1

3 6 1 0 0 1 0 8 11

4 0 0 2 3 4 4 13 11

5 27 0 0 0 1 0 28 0

6 26 0 0 0 0 0 26 1

7 28 1 0 1 0 0 30 0



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TABLE B2

Object DPs (complete noun phrases) and NPs (incomplete noun phrases) with a finite verb, a

non-finite verb and without a verb.

Object

With a verb Without a verb Total objects Omitted objects

Participant DP NP DP NP

1 14 2 1 0 17 5

2 12 2 2 2 18 12

3 8 2 0 0 10 9

4 9 4 2 7 22 2

5 1 0 0 1 2 26

6 8 6 0 0 14 13

7 23 2 0 0 25 5

8 6 3 1 1 11 10Total 81 21 6 11 119 82



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on the relation between structural case, determiners, and verbs in ism a study of hebrew and dutch

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