Thematic role hierarchy violations in Persian Alzheimer’s patients

زبانشناسی و گویش های خراسان

Article 1, Volume 5, Issue 9, July 2013, Pages 1-25   

Document Type: علمی - پژ‍وهشی

DOI: 10.22067/lj.v5i9.37334

Authors

Shala Raqibdust^* ; Omid Azad

Abstract

Predicates are words or groups of words which are considered as the most important semantic elements of the sentence. Following Manouilidou, Almeida, Schwartz and Nair, this research investigates the nature of verb disorder in Persian Alzheimer patients. To this end, the property of thematic role assignment by three kinds of predicates has been focused upon. The first kind of predicates includes those whose argument realization follows the standard hierarchical thematic role (e.g. kandan). The second type includes those whose argument realization violates the standard argument realization (e.g. tarsidan). The third type includes those which violate the standard hierarchical thematic roles (e.g. xoshnud kardan). Two monolingual Persian AD patients under the support of Iran’s Alzheimer Association and five matched elderly controls performed a sentence completion task in which they had to choose a predicate that would render the sentence grammatical and meaningful. AD patients showed no problems with canonical structures but performed worse than controls in psychological verb sentences. The results support the hypothesis that AD’s deficit is in the mapping between syntactic and semantic relation, particularly in the assignment of thematic roles to the arguments of the predicates.

Keywords

Alzheimer’s disease; thematic roles; psychological predicates