Editor's Introduction

The present volume deals with different aspects of speech and language pathology and identifies and re-examines, from various perspectives, a number of standard assumptions in clinical linguistics and in cognitive science. It encompasses issues on deafness, stuttering, child language acquisition and impairments, Specific Language Impairment (SLI), William’s Syndromes deficit, fluent aphasia and agrammatism. Different levels of linguistic analysis are considered: phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Some of their properties, their formal representations and their interfaces with other levels are examined closely and clarified.Authors summarize their individual results in their contributions, not only in the format of an article (subjects, materials, languages, scores, etc.), but also with thorough discussion of the relevant literature. Their work is located in different lines of research: structuralist tenets, generative approaches, and frameworks such as Optimality Theory. The topics discussed are intricate and complex and, at the same time, quite wide-ranging in scope, but the chapters in this book offer a fairly comprehensive overview of the complexity and the emerging importance of the field. The authors’ analyses reflect various aspects of the fierce theoretical and empirical debates currently ranging over almost every issue discussed, with respect to linguistics and the other cognitive disciplines. Although it is very difficult to do justice to all of the subtleties of argumentation that each of these lines of investigation require, the rather technical issues discussed in this volume have a bearing on questions of considerable interest. They presuppose or imply assumptions about the internal architecture of the language faculty, whose location among other systems of the mind/brain is not at all obvious. The interdisciplinary complexity of the interface language/cognition is also explored by focusing on empirical data of different languages: among them, Germanic languages (such as Dutch, English, German), Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Romance languages (such as Catalan, Italian, Spanish) and Sohsho, a Zulu language. As well as the different approaches and the variety of problems posed in this volume, there is a common aim to the chapters. The authors piece together various fragments of clinical linguistic research, trying to bring them into a more cohesive whole, and offer a sense of some of the technical problems that lie at the forefront of research and of the kind of answers that it may be possible to provide for them today. The aim of this volume is to stress the growing importance of the theoretical and methodological linguistic tools developed in this area of interest; to bring under scrutiny assumptions taken for granted in previous analyses, which may not be as obvious as they seem; to investigate how even apparently minimal choices in the description of phenomena may affect the form and complexity of the language/cognition interface. What is called ‘clinical work’ is not separable from the scientific work done by linguists; it is instead a component part of it. It is concerned with the actual foundation of the study of linguistic pathologies, together with neurobiology, psychology and neurology and the outer reaches of scientific speculation about the nature of the mind/brain with regard to language.