Syntactic Analysis of Simple Sentences in Telugu

A Psycho-Neurolinguistic Perspective

Abstract

With nearly 82 million speakers as per the 2011 census, Telugu is the fourth most used language in India after Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. Telugu belongs to the South-Central group of Dravidian Language family. The basic word order in Telugu is Subject-Object-Verb and is flexible to indicate emphasis. Aphasia, resulting from brain damage to language areas in the brain, can be of different types. The aim of this paper is to provide a descriptive analyzes of Syntactic deficits seen in Telugu speaking Broca’s aphasics (a type of Aphasia) in the production of simple sentence structures. The analyses revealed errors as: a) Productions of verbs in verbless constructions. b)Among the omission errors subject omission was the most frequent phenomenon followed by verb omission and followed by object omission. c) Agreement errors were more in terms of person and number than gender and d) Demonstrative pronouns were omitted in most of the responses. Two fold conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, as seen in literature, syntactic errors occur when damage to Broca’s area is seen, thus reiterating the fact that Broca’s area is involved in syntactic processing of language cross-linguistically and the secondly some language specific features could be seen.