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19 - Grammatical Aspects of Language Processing in the Brain

A Role and Reference Grammar Perspective

from Part Four - Applications of RRG

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Robert D. Van Valin
Edited by
Delia Bentley ,
Ricardo Mairal Usón ,
Wataru Nakamura  and
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Delia Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Ricardo Mairal Usón
Affiliation:
Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid
Wataru Nakamura
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Summary

The past twenty years have brought a revolution in the understanding of how the human brain accomplishes language comprehension, as more sophisticated models have been proposed in response to the discovery of brain regions in the left hemisphere other than Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas involved in syntactic and semantic processing. Nevertheless, some old mysteries remain unsolved. One of these is the surprising finding that some split-brain patients have some linguistic abilities in their isolated right hemisphere, including, for a few, the ability to make grammaticality judgements. If the neural machinery for syntactic processing is found exclusively in the left hemisphere, this should not be possible. This paper proposes an account of this unexpected phenomenon using the grammatical tools of Role and Reference Grammar, and the solution has implications for the theory itself as well as for another old mystery, namely the ability of some aphasics, who cannot correctly interpret reversible passives, to nevertheless judge the grammaticality of sentences.

Keywords

syntactic processingsemantic processingsplit-brain patientsaphasia
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar , pp. 693 - 736
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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