19 International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics ...

G E N E R A L S E S S I O N
Past tense production by Greek speaking patients with Parkinson’s disease
1 Stavroula Stavrakaki, 2 Zoe Katsarou, 3 Sevasti Bostantjopoulou & 4 Harald Clahsen
1&3 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2 Hippokration Hospital, Thessaloniki & 4 University of Essex
1 svoula@auth.gr, 2 zoekatmd@otenet.gr, 3 bostkamb@otenet.gr & 4 harald@essex.ac.uk
This study aims at testing the hypothesis that dysfunction of basal ganglia and frontal lobe circuits in
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) affects the procedural brain memory and, in particular, grammatical rules
(Ullman et al. <strong>19</strong>97), by studying the production of past tense forms by Greek-speaking patients with
PD. Current studies of the past tense in PD revealed controversial results with respect to the patients’
ability to produce regular and irregular past tense forms. On the one hand, some researchers suggest
that PD patients are performing better on irregular than regular past tense forms (Ullman et al. <strong>19</strong>97)
whilst others report no impairments in the regular past tense (Longworth et al. 2005; Penke et al.
2005). As far as Greek-speaking PD patients are concerned, Terzi et al. (2005) found that they
produced high correctness scores for regular and irregular verbs of existing verbs and showed no
dissociation between regular and irregular past tense formation.
In this study, we tested 27 non-demented patients with PD recruited from the 3 rd Neurological Clinic
of the University of Thessaloniki and 30 normal controls matched to PD patients on chronological age
and years of education. The patients were classified into different stages according to the Hoehn &
Yahr scale (Hoehn & Yahr <strong>19</strong>67) while their kinetic symptoms (akinesia included) were assessed by
the Unified Parkinson’s Dementia Rating Scale (UPDRS) (Fahn et al. <strong>19</strong>87) and their mental abilities
were assessed by the Dementia Rating Scale (DRS) (Mattis <strong>19</strong>88).
The experimental task was an elicited production task supported by pictures and designed to elicit
sigmatic and non-sigmatic past tense forms.
The experimental material consisted of
(i) Existing sigmatic and non-sigmatic verbs
(ii) Sigmatic and non-sigmatic novel verbs rhyming with sigmatics and non-sigmatic verbs
(iii) Novel non-rhymes that do not allow ‘analogical’ recall of sigmatic and non-sigmatic forms
The results indicated that PD patients showed high level of correct performance on the production
of existing sigmatic and non-sigmatic forms and provided no evidence for a dissociation between
regular and irregular inflection, a finding that is in line with Terzi et al. (2005). Furthermore, the
patients produced a high number of sigmatic responses for sigmatic and non-sigmatic rhymes,
similarly to the control participants. By contrast, whilst some patients showed the same performance
as control participants in the non-rhyme condition with a clear preference for sigmatic forms, other
patients underused sigmatic forms relative to the control group. The patients in this latter subgroup
were all at an advanced stage of PD (levels 3 and 4 on the Hoehn & Yahr scale) and showed high
levels of akinesia (levels 3 and 4). Thus in our sample deficits in past-tense production as measured
by the production of sigmatic forms in the non-rhyme condition appear to be restricted to advanced
stages of PD.
The Event Paradox
Alexandros Tantos
University of Konstanz
alexandros.tantos@uni-konstanz.de
The aim of this talk is to present and analyze a paradox which arises through the use of complex
events as the denotation of causative verbs. According to the majority of event-based theories in the
syntax-semantics interface, (a.o. Hale and Keyser <strong>19</strong>93, Pustejovsky <strong>19</strong>95, Kratzer <strong>19</strong>96, Alsina <strong>19</strong>96,
Levin and Rappaport <strong>19</strong>99, 2005, Ramchand 2008) complex events consist of at least two parts of the
same ontological status, namely events. This kind of analysis is based on more semantically-oriented
theories of algebras of events. These theories assume the domain of events is well-defined and is
closed under certain operations, one of which is the operation of summation. The structure of complex
events is also assumed to play a decisive factor for the projection of arguments of causative verbs to
syntax. This common strategy of summing events related to each other with causation is questioned
relatively easily when it comes to the study of contexts with more than one sentences, when the
discourse inference is based on implicit lexical semantic knowledge. The focus will be on a subclass of
Greek transitive causative verbs, the break class of Levin's (<strong>19</strong>93) class of change of state verbs.
These are the Greek verbs σπάζω, πελεκώ, ραγίζω, βροντοκτυπώ, συντρίβω, θραύω, σχίζω,
θρυµµατίζω, τσακίζω, κροταλίζω.
<strong>19</strong> th ISTAL 54