Elisa Zampieri’s research while affiliated with Ca' Foscari University of Venice and other places

In this work, we aim at investigating the performance of an Italian Agrammatic speaker with compound words, with major emphasis on the processing of (complex and simple) prepositions inside words, thus aiming at especially evaluating the performance with prepositional compounds of the [NOUN HEAD-PREP-DEPENDANT NOUN; N-P-N] form (coda di cavallo, horse-tail) and exocentric compounds of the [PREP-NOUN; P-NI form (sopracciglio, eyebrow). Bisetto and Scalise (1999) showed that it is realistic to consider N-P-N items as fully productive compound words in Italian, due to the fact that they obey to a set of classic compound-hood tests. Our results demonstrate that SM is selectively impaired in retrieving the prepositions linking the modifying nouns to their head. Our data can trigger interesting interpretations, from a theoretical viewpoint. In particular, complex prepositions (e.g. fuori, outside), which are produced with no significant problems by SM, are likely to be relational nouns and not functional axial parts (Svenonius, 2006) when involved in the formation of Italian P-N compounds. Otherwise, a deficit in retrieving them correctly would be expected (specific agrammatic deficits for axial parts have been detected in Zampieri et al., 2011). Moreover, a crucial question is raised: are N-P-N real compounds, since they behave very differently from other compounds in SM performance? Possibly, the same underlying architecture holds both when these items are processed as phrased and when they are processed as "lexicalized syntax" in a constructionist fashion (Jackendoff, 2002; Booij, 2005; Starke, 2009). Given the very similar poor performance of SM with both N-P-N compound-like-items and analogous phrases, a unified analysis of this sort is strongly suggested by our study.

The present study deals with sentence repetition in MB, an Italian patient with mixed transcortical aphasia. In preliminary testing, MB spontaneously resisted accurate repetition when presented with sentences featuring morphosyntactic violations (see Davis et al., 1978). MB also managed to repeat all the proposed phrasal chunks, even in complex sentences. Interestingly, MB tended to move the constituents with the violation (always oblique arguments/adjuncts) to the beginning of the sentence or to another non-canonical position (e.g., dislocating adjuncts immediately before verbs). Thus, he selectively performed “adjunct scrambling”. A detailed experimental task confirmed that MB only moved adjuncts or optional complements. Interestingly, most of the scrambled constituents were prosodically-marked by pitch-peaks as contrastive foci. We argue that MB resorts to scrambling as a syntactic strategy. In doing so, he activates projections that encode information related to the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics.

The aim of this study is to experimentally investigate Evaluative Morphology (EM) in an Italian agrammatic speaker. In neurolinguistic literature, to our knowledge, there are no previous attempts to systematically analyze possible deficits, specifically concerning EM in agrammatic speakers. Previous theoretical works argued that Italian EM should be considered as a specific type of lexical process, different from both inflection and derivation (Scalise 1984). In recent years, there have been many works devoted to the study of evaluative morphology from a syntactic viewpoint (e.g. Cinque 2006, 2011; Ott 2011; De Belder et al. 2009, to appear). Data from agrammatic production is crucial for checking the validity of a syntactic approach to evaluative markers. The results show that our agrammatic Crossed Aphasic speaker does not have a specific deficit for evaluative morphology. This fact seems to weaken a syntactic approach to EM, where e.g. evaluative markers are treated as functional heads within an extended projection. In fact, given that agrammatic speakers are standardly assumed to be impaired with the production of morphosyntactic functional items (see e.g. Berndt & Caramazza 1980; Miceli et al. 1989), words with evaluative morphemes appears to be stored in the lexicon and not syntactically derived.

We report the case of a classic agrammatic speaker of Italian in repeating locative Figure/Ground relations via complex prepositions consisting of a locative axial preposition and a simple preposition in light of recent theoretical accounts of prepositions and the existing literature on prepositions in aphasia...

In this work we want to address the syntax of the so-called inflected prepositions (preposizioni articolate) in Italian, relying on experimental data from clinical linguistics. We argue against the arguments of Napoli and Nevis (1987) for the existence of a lexically independent "monadic" class of inflected prepositions. The data collected here -which represent an early stage of a broader on-going work on the morphosyntax of Italian prepositions in aphasic populations -clearly show that Italian inflected prepositions are not primitives in the Lexicon, but the morphological by-product of a syntactic process of incorporation / conflation (Baker, 1988; Hale and Keyser, 1993; Julien, 2002).