Is Alzheimer’s Disease a Cross-Linguistic Issue? Comparing Corpora from a Role and Reference Grammar Perspective

Abstract

Taking Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997; Van Valin, 2005) as theoretical framework, we analyze three corpora of patients with Alzheimer’s disease: two in Spanish — PerLA (Pérez Mantero, 2014) and Peraita & Grasso (2010) — and one in English — Pittsburgh (Becker et al., 1994). This grammar is part of the functionalist approaches to language and it provides a series of ordered steps that connect syntax and semantics, as well as incorporating discourse-pragmatics. Thus, we compare the results of the three corpora after applying this syntax-semantics interface to a representative sample with the aim of verifying how Alzheimer’s disease behaves in the two languages. Our study shows that there are no significant differences in syntax and semantics in both languages, and that pragmatics plays a more important role than expected at first.