Syntax, strategies, and the single case: a reply to Zurif

Zurif (1996) upholds a traditional view of clinical categories in aphasia research that seems calculated to retard theoretical progress. By contrast, we hold that individual patients who show previously undiscovered patterns of syntactic impairment should be placed on record irrespective of whether the subjectʹs overall clinical presentation fits neatly into any nineteenth-century classification scheme. It is particularly important to document cases where the counterintuitive form of the syntactic disorder cannot be explained by prior models of aphasic comprehension, but can nonetheless be well described within the modular structure of current grammatical theory.