The eventive representation of Italian -tore nominals in agrammatism: a case study

Traditional morphological approaches regard Italian -tore nominals as the only agentive derivatives that can have a dual interpretation: one that is structurally more similar to a verb and thus encodes an eventive representation and one that actually resembles a nominal structure lacking the representation of an event. More recent reviews of this topic, however, hypothesize that both interpretations share the same deep structure, but show a difference in terms of aspectual features. The present study aims to investigate this matter by testing how the agentive suffix -tore is processed in aphasia, inasmuch as previous neurolinguistic studies have shown that aphasic patients are sensitive to the eventive structure embedded in deverbal nominalizations. An experiment was carried out employing neuropsychological methods and involving two aphasic patients and a control group. What results reveal is that patients do not show an overall substantial difference when elaborating eventive and non-eventive contexts. What appears to be significantly compromised, instead, is handling [+agent] feature in eventive interpretations, suggesting that the impairment emerges when processing different bundles of features, rather than a different syntactic structure.