TENSE AND AGREEMENT IN AGRAMMATIC PRODUCTION - PRUNING THE SYNTACTIC TREE

This paper discusses the description of agrammatic production focusing on the verbal inflectional morphology. Agrammatism in Hebrew is inves tigated through an experiment with a patient who displays a highly sel ective impairment: agreement inflection is completely intact, but tens e inflection, use of copula, and embedded structures are severely impa ired. A retrospective examination of the literature shows that our fin dings are corroborated by others. A selective account of the agrammati c production deficiency is proposed, according to which only a subclas s of the functional syntactic categories is impaired in this syndrome. The consequence of this deficit is the pruning of the syntactic phras e marker of agrammatic patients, which impairs performance from the im paired node and higher. These findings also bear upon central issues i n linguistic theories, particularly that of Pollock (1989), regarding split inflection. (C) 1997 Academic Press.