Abstract
In this paper, I present an analysis of prepositional phrases in a corpus of connected speech of Czech speakers with aphasia. The corpus created by the author contains transcripts of conversational, narrative, descriptive, and procedural discourse elicited from 11 individuals with aphasia (mild to moderate, fluent and non-fluent).
Methods
All prepositional phrases (PP) produced with no disfluencies (filled or silent pauses, repetitions) were extracted which resulted in a total of 202 phrases. These PPs were analyzed using frequency data from a corpus of spoken Czech and a corpus of movie subtitles (bigram frequency of preposition and complement noun, cumulative frequency of the complement lemma, and relative frequency of the word forms of the complement).
Results
The analysis has shown that 10 of the 11 participants were able to produce at least some instances of PP without any disfluencies. A substantial number of these PPs expresses spatial relations and has similar frequency characteristics: the complement noun has a high relative frequency of occurrence in the grammatical case governed by the preposition.
Conclusions
The results provide some support for the usage-based model of language representation and processing. High relative frequency and probability of occurrence reflects a higher level of entrenchment which requires fewer processing resources, resulting in a higher probability of success in production even in individuals with relatively low levels of fluency overall.