The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect language comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation - Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss-Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448-450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain-behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter language comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying language comprehension.

Language is a system of communication in which grammatical structures function to express meaning in context. While all languages can achieve the same basic communicative ends, they each use different means to achieve them, particularly in the divergent ways that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact across languages. This book looks in detail at how structure, meaning, and communicative function interact in human languages. Working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), Van Valin proposes a set of rules, called the 'linking algorithm', which relates syntactic and semantic representations to each other, with discourse-pragmatics playing a role in the linking. Using this model, he discusses the full range of grammatical phenomena, including the structures of simple and complex sentences, verb and argument structure, voice, reflexivization and extraction restrictions. Clearly written and comprehensive, this book will be welcomed by all those working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

This paper presents the basic concepts of Role and Reference Grammar [RRG], a theory of grammar which draws heavily on the analysis of non-lndo-European languages and which is concerned with the interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics in grammatical systems. RRG is a monostratal theory which posits a single syntactic representation for a sentence, which is linked directly to a semantic representation by means of a linking algorithm. The syntactic representation of clause structure in RRG is called the layered structure of the clause. It postulates that clauses are universally composed of a nucleus (which contains the predicating element), a core (which contains the nucleus and the arguments of the predicating element), and a periphery (which contains the temporal and locative modifiers of the core). Modifying each of the layers of the clause are what are called operators in RRG: they include grammatical categories like tense, aspect, modality, negation and illocutionary force. Complex sentences are composed of these units: nucleus + nucleus constitutes a nuclear juncture, core + core constitutes a core juncture, and clause + clause constitutes a clausal juncture. The units in a juncture may stand in one of three relationships to each other: coordination, subordination and cosubordination. There are thus nine abstract juncture-nexus types in universal grammar, and the juncture-nexus types occurring in a particular language may be realized by one or more formal construction types.The semantic representation of a sentence is built on an Aktionsart-based system of lexical decomposition; it is termed a logical structure [LS]. The semantic functions of arguments are defined in terms of LS-positions. Crucial to the theory is the notion of semantic macrorole; there are two, actor and undergoer. The macroroles and other arguments are linked to the syntax by the linking algorithm. RRG does not assume traditional grammatical relations; it recognizes only a single grammatical function, termed the privileged syntactic argument.Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., A Concise Introduction to Role and Reference Grammar FLUMINENSIA, god. 12 (2000) br. 1-2, sIr. 47-78 48In addition to the syntactic and semantic representations, there is also a representation of the focus structure of the sentence. It indicates the scope of the assertion in an utterance in contrast to the pragmatic presupposition. It is an important part of the RRG analysis of many grammatical phenomena, and one of the theory's major typological claims is that significant differences amonggrammatical systems reflect the different roles that focus structure can play in the grammar, particularly in the linking algorithm.The RRG view of language acquisition holds that children construct a grammar on the basis of their general cognitive endowment plus the data in the speech to which they are exposed; no autonombus language acquisition device is required.

This book is an introduction to syntactic theory and analysis which can be used for both introductory and advanced courses in theoretical syntax. Offering an alternative to the standard generative view of the subject, it deals with the major issues in syntax with which all theories are concerned. It presents syntactic phenomena from a wide range of languages and introduces students to the major typological issues that syntactic theories must address. A generous number of exercises is included, which provide practice with the concepts introduced in the text and in addition expose the student to in-depth analysis of data from many languages. Each chapter contains suggestions for further reading which encompass work from many theoretical perspectives. A separate teaching guide is available.

Do the brains of men and women show similar patterns of functional organization for language, or are men more strongly lateralized? We used PET to measure cerebral blood flow (CBF) as men and women read real and nonce verbs, and produced past tense forms. While the overall patterns of reaction time, error, and brain activation were similar, there were also significant sex-related differences in CBF patterns. During the past tense generation tasks, men showed left-lateralized activation while women recruited bilateral perisylvian cortex, confirming differences in functional laterality. During all tasks, women showed higher activation in occipital and/or cerebellar regions, suggesting differences in basic reading strategies. We conclude that sex differences in functional cortical organization exist in the absence of significant behavioral differences.