Tense and agreement impairment in Ibero-Romance.

Abstract

We examine the inflectional productions of seven Catalan, seven Galician, and seven Spanish speaking agrammatic subjects in an elicitation and a sentence repetition task and consider them in the light of the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH). The results show relatively spared subject person/number agreement with the verb and impaired tense marking for all subjects in all the languages. Recent reformulations of syntactic theory [Chomsky (1999) MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics (vol. 18). MA: The MIT Press; (2000). Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik (pp. 89-155). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press] regarding the locus of agreement force a reconsideration of the TPH for it to make the desired predictions; we adopt Cinque's [(1999) Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press] array of functional mood/tense/aspect projections and we show that subject agreement must occur between the subject DP and a low functional head for selective impairment to result. Feature underspecification, formerly considered, is rendered unnecessary.