oa Productie en begrip van voorzetsels bij sprekers met agrammatische en vloeiende afasie

Prepositions are so-called closed class words and are generally coined as function words. It is not correct, however, to consider prepositions as a homogeneous word class, even though structurally the preposition is always the head of a PP. To, for example, can have different functions: it can have a lexical function, as in the man is walking to the car, a subcategorized function, as in the man is listening to his wife, and a syntactic function, as in the man is giving flowers to his wife. In this paper, we will present the data of a study from the 1980s, completed with more recent spontaneous speech data, to the production and comprehension of prepositions by individuals with a lexical deficit or grammatical deficit due to brain damage. The results indicate that there is empirical evidence for a distinction within the class of prepositions on the basis of their lexical and grammatical characteristics and, hence, that the general statement that all prepositions are function words is not justified. The use of prepositions with a lexical and subcategorized function is compromized in individuals with a lexical impairment, whereas individuals with a grammatical deficit encounter problems with prepositions with a grammatical function.