Definition:
The pathological inability to use words in grammatical sequence. A form of aphasia. Adjective: agrammatic. See also: dysfluency.
Examples and Observations:
- "A symptom of aphasia in which the patient has trouble producing well-formed words and grammatical sentences, and trouble understanding sentences whose meanings depend on their syntax, such as The dog was tickled by the cat."
(Steven Pinker, "Agrammatism," Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. HarperCollins, 1999) - "The English language has a relatively constrained canonical sentence order: subject, then verb, then object (SVO). Varying that order carries grammatical meaning (e.g., passive). Grammatically speaking, Standard American English (SAE) contains a sizable number of free-standing functor words (i.e., 'grammatical words') and limited inflections. Inflections generally mark tense and plurality in SAE, and, except for irregular forms, are added to the root word without altering the original word structure. Thus, in a sentence like, 'She is speaking,' 'is' is a free functor, whereas '-ing' is an inflection that marks present continuity.
"Agrammatism in English manifests itself primarily as the omission of, or substitution for, functors. Agrammatic speakers of English preserve word order, but omit free functors, like 'is,' and inflections, like '-ing,' while retaining a telegraphic skeleton ('She speak'). The agrammatic speaker is thus able to produce a degree of connected speech but is missing some required grammatical information."
(O'Connor, B., Anema, I., Datta, H., Singnorelli, and T., Obler, L. K., "Agrammatism: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective," The ASHA Leader, 2005)
Pronunciation: ah-GRAM-ah-tiz-em
