Roxana-Maria Barbu

Intended venue: International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders

Aims & Scope

International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders is the official peer
reviewed journal of the Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists. It is a key publication
in the field of speech, language, communication disorders and speech and language therapy. We
believe that the dissemination and application to practice of high quality research can improve
the lives of people with communication disorders. Our aim is therefore to publish the highest
quality science in the field with the potential to significantly impact practice.
The journal provides a forum for the exchange of information and discussion of issues of
clinical and/or theoretical relevance in the above areas. All papers should clearly communicate
their relevance to speech, language, communication disorders and speech and language therapy
(SLT), and specifically communicate how the paper can be applied to SLT practice.

The current paper presents an initial draft of the introduction section to a review article targeting
the above mentioned journal.
Roxana-Maria Barbu

What is argument structure, and where we may encounter it:

a review of the literature
Argument structure refers to a special relationship between any given verb and the crucial
entities minimally involved in ensuring the event and/or activity described by the verb occurs.
Given an event such as sending, it is somewhat clear and intuitive that for sending to occur, three
participants are crucial: a sender, something being sent, and a receiver. The vast majority of
verbs can be categorized as one- (e.g., sleep, laugh), two- (e.g., read, break), or three-argument
verbs (e.g., hand, pass). Deeply entrenched in most linguist theories, the concept of argument
structure is backed up by neuro- and psycho-linguistic evidence, in both impaired and non-
impaired populations (eye-tracking - Boland and Blodgett 2006, Lee and Thompson 2011; ERP
Frisch et al., 2004; fMRI Thompson et al., 2007, among others).
Despite the rich literature on argument structure and the overall agreement regarding
different classes of verbs and their argument requirements, the complexity of argument structure
arises from its dual nature. Specifically, verbs have long been recognized as having a dual nature,
semantic and syntactic, and this dual nature transfers to their arguments. The semantic nature
refers to entities conceptually necessary for an activity or event to take place, while the syntactic
nature refers to phrases that must accompany the verb in a linguistic string for a sentence to be
natural-sounding. Ideally, there would be a one-to-one mapping between semantics and syntax
(e.g., Chris devoured the pizza, where devour takes two semantic and two syntactic arguments);
however, that is not always the case. Let us consider the verbs devour, eat, and munch to
illustrate this mismatch. While all three verbs illustrate ingestion of food, and therefore,
semantically, they require the same two participants (someone eating, and something being
eaten), they vastly differ in their syntactic requirements (Barbu and Toivonen, 2016). While
devour requires two syntactic arguments, eat can take two syntactic arguments, however, the
second is optional (Chris ate the pizza, and Chris ate are both acceptable). This dual nature of
argument structure provides the optimal environment for a variety of language difficulties where
assessing whether the root lies in semantics, syntax or at the semantics-syntax interface becomes
very difficult to pinpoint.
Since verbs are strong pillars of communication, it is needless to state that argument
structure (i.e., verbs and their participants) is as crucial. Unfortunately, understanding argument
structure in the context of language is not an easy task. On one hand, language impairments, or
better yet, patients of language impairments form an incredibly heterogeneous group. To
complicate things even further, these language impairments are sometimes associated with
genetic disorders (e.g., Cri du chat), other times with trauma (e.g., traumatic brain injury), and in
some cases there is no agreement as to whether there is or not a genetic reason (e.g., autism). On
the other hand, argument structure is a complex linguistic process, especially due to its semantic
and syntactic components that are not clearly understood yet; therefore, we do not have a clear
understanding of what can go wrong. In turn, this translates in us not knowing what we should be
assessing in the first place, or how we could capture some of these seemingly subtle impairments
in the first place.
Roxana-Maria Barbu

At first sight, one may question why we would even attempt assessing and diagnosing
impairments so subtle; however, the issue is that we do not understand yet what seemingly subtle
impairments may affect. Patients of Wernickes aphasia may show no impairments in argument
structure production, may respond on behaviour tasks correctly above chance level; however,
they have an impaired representation of argument structure (Shapiro et al., 1993). In other words,
the commonly used clich that certain populations see the world differently may not be a
clich after all. Patients suffering of Wernickes aphasia may have a completely different
understanding of the world because of their representation of verbs, and in turn, of events.
Similarly, autistic individuals have difficulty with verbs with increased argument structure.
While they process one- and two- argument verbs similar to normally developing individuals,
they differ in processing three-argument verbs; specifically, they cannot process the third
argument (Janke and Perovic, 2015). A similar trend was described by Kristoffersen 2009, where
a young girl suffering from Cri du chat syndrome elicited considerably more one- and two-
argument verbs (39 and 59 respectively) than three-argument verbs (two). I selected these three
studies to illustrate that verbs with increased argument structure (three-argument verbs) seem to
be more difficult to process than verbs with decreased argument structure (one- and two-
argument verbs). However, patterns of argument structure impairment are not always as
intuitive. Grela (2003) showed that children with Down syndrome have double and triple
percentage of subject omissions in one- and two-argument structure verbs compared to normally
developing children; however, in a different task, typically developing children produced more
than double anomalous arguments than children with Down syndrome.
Given the extensive research on argument structure in linguistics, it is surprisingly
unclear how argument structure can be affected in various neurological diseases or injuries.
Given the lack of communication between clinical professionals (i.e., speech pathologists,
psychologists, neurologists, and language therapy instructors) and theoretical linguistics, a
synthesis of previously completed studies in neurologically impaired populations could serve a
dual purpose. Firstly, from a clinical perspective, it serves as a reference as to what possible
disorders may be associated with argument structure impairments. Secondly, through empirical
data from argument structure impairments, it would inform our current theoretical models. To
date, there are not enough studies to structure the review by disorder, and there is not enough
consistency across argument structure assessment methods to organize studies by methodology
or by focusing on the semantic or syntactic nature. However, these limitations are an
encouragement to consider all studies because patients with disorders that could not be more
different have an underlying impairment in argument structure, be it in production or
understanding. This review serves as an invitation to collaboration to further our understanding
of argument structure, of what can go wrong, and of what populations may be susceptible to
argument structure impairments. The objective of this review is to examine reports of argument
structure impairments in various neurological disorders or injuries, regardless of age or language
and to propose a revised theoretical account of argument structure accounting for and consistent
with current empirical evidence.
Roxana-Maria Barbu

References:
Roxana-Maria Barbu and Ida Toivonen. Event participants and linguistic arguments. In:
Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C. (Eds.) (2016). Proceedings
of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive
Science Society.
Boland, J. E., & Blodgett, A. (2006). Argument status and PP-attachment. Journal of
psycholinguistic research, 35(5), 385-403.
Frisch, S., Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (2004). Word category and verbargument structure
information in the dynamics of parsing. Cognition, 91(3), 191-219.
Grela, B. G. (2003). Do children with Down syndrome have difficulty with argument
structure?. Journal of communication disorders, 36(4), 263-279.
Janke, V., & Perovic, A. (2015). Intact grammar in HFA? Evidence from control and
binding. Lingua, 164, 68-86.
Kristoffersen, K. E. (2009). Grammatical constructions in Cri du chat syndromeFindings from
a case study. Clinical linguistics & phonetics, 23(12), 858-871.
Lee, J., & Thompson, C. K. (2011). Real-time production of arguments and adjuncts in normal
and agrammatic speakers. Language and cognitive processes, 26(8), 985-1021.
Mainardi, P. C. (2006). Cri du Chat syndrome. Orphanet journal of rare diseases, 1(1), 33.
Shapiro, L. P., Gordon, B., Hack, N., & Killackey, J. (1993). Verb-argument structure processing
in complex sentences in Broca s and Wernicke s aphasia. Brain and language, 45(3),
423-447.
Thompson, C. K., Bonakdarpour, B., Fix, S. C., Blumenfeld, H. K., Parrish, T. B., Gitelman, D.
R., & Mesulam, M. M. (2007). Neural correlates of verb argument structure
processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19(11), 1753-1767.