ABSTRACT
Generalized Minimality (GM) introduced a radically different approach to explain the familiar set of data relating to agrammatic comprehension of non-canonical sentences. Earlier approaches to agrammatic language production and comprehension focused on impairment and the lack of knowledge or lack of the ability to implement knowledge, GM attempts to derive grammatical and agrammatic behaviour from the single notion of locality. Agrammatic patients have selective problems with non-local movement the movement of a Determiner Phrase (DP) that crosses over another DP in object relatives/cleft sentences and object wh-questions. The Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) and GM share the intuition that high positions on the syntactic tree are vulnerable. Grillo, like Friedmann, argues that categories associated with Complementizer Phrase (CP) wh-questions, relative clauses, topic and focus, are the most vulnerable structures for agrammatic patients. Processing theories that do not assume loss of knowledge are not challenged by variable performance within and across patients, and across time.
