Martínez-Ferreiro, S. 1 , Sánchez Alonso, S. 2 & Bachrach, A. 3
1 Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
2 University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
3 umr 7023, CNRS
The present contribution provides evidence for the complexity of unaccusative verb argument structure in Spanish agrammatism by means of two experimental tasks: elicited production of verbs with alternating transitivity (Sánchez Alonso 2010) and a battery of unaccusative production and comprehension measures (adapted from McCallister 2007). The aim is twofold: a) to deepen our understanding of the source of difficulties and b) to determine the role of the clitic pronoun se in unaccusative constructions. Cross-linguistic research on language pathologies has shown that the production of unaccusative verbs is problematic for agrammatic subjects (Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld 2005; McCallister 2007; Dragoy & Bastiaanse 2010; a.o.). The difficulty that unaccusative verbs pose for this population has been explained by the number and type of arguments associated with the verb (ASCH - Thompson 2003) and by the role played by syntactic movement in determining patterns of impaired production and comprehension (DOP-H - Bastiaanse and van Zonneveld 2005; McCallister 2007). Our results show that moved constituents play a crucial role in patients’ performance. Additionally, Spanish data present one critical difference with respect to already documented languages: the use of se, a morphological marker of unaccusativity. Difficulties with clitic production have been widely documented in the literature from agrammatism (Avrutin 1999; Stavrakaki and Kouvava 2003; Chinellatto 2004; a.o.). Consequently, data may also enlighten the comprehension of these deficits. Since dissociation among clitic types have been attested in the results from different tests (Rossi 2007; Martínez-Ferreiro 2010), reflexives and transitive sentences with DO clitics are also analyzed in the first task. The present data supported the previous dissociation among clitics and raised questions about the role of the pronoun se in the processing of unaccusative sentences. These tasks constitute the first effort towards a characterization of the degree of impairment of argument structure in Spanish agrammatism.