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  • 19 - Grammatical Aspects of Language Processing in the Brain

  • from Part Four - Applications of RRG
  • Edited by Delia Bentley, University of Manchester, Ricardo Mairal Usón, Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Wataru Nakamura, Tohoku University, Japan, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar
    Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023, pp 693-736

  • 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.