The syntax-semantics interface and clinical Linguistics: The linking algorithm of Role and Reference Grammar in patients with Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Clinical linguistics analyzes and describes communication and language impairment in patients, a field in which aphasia and phonetic features have been widely studied. In this paper, I propound a syntax-semantics analysis by means of the linking algorithm shown in Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005), which will be applied to a sample of transcriptions from the corpus compiled by Peraita and Grasso (2010) with patients that suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, the aims of this paper are, first, to analyze the verb predicates from patients of the first stage of the disease in search of language deficits; and, second, to show how this grammar may improve the description of the language in these patients and its possible early diagnosis. The results manifest that patients use states as the default Aktionsart; they tend to express more simple sentences and clauses than subordinate, coordinate and cosubordinate elements; we also find that most arguments are realized as verbal morphemes; and that patients rely more on the discourse-pragmatic content to compensate their cognitive deficits.