Nominalization in Aphasia: a Case Study

BACKGROUND AND CASE HISTORY In Linguistics deverbal nominals are defined as nouns displaying some verbal properties. The nature of nominalization has been long debated and since Lees (1960) and Chomsky (1970) a syntactic account has been opposed to a lexical-semantic one. Importantly, both the accounts agree in that deverbal nouns are not a homogeneous class: according to Grimshaw (1990) and Alexiadou & Grimshaw (2008), complex event-nominals (e.g. ‘examination’) can assign thematic roles and are compatible with aspectual modifiers but cannot have a plural reading whereas result-nominals (e.g. ‘offer’) show the opposite pattern. In order to test if there is some cognitive plausibility that deverbal nominals: (i) involve verbal properties, i.e. are not simple nouns, (ii) involve some verbal properties syntactic in nature, (iii) are not a homogeneous class, an experimental study has been conducted involving an Italian 76-year-old right-handed aphasic patient (ED) and two control subjects. ED suffered a CVA involving the left frontal lobe only. He was administered the AAT and classified as mild Broca’s aphasic; the BADA revealed a noun-verb dissociation, verbs being significantly more impaired than nouns.