The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol 10, 421-423, Copyright © 1998 by The MIT Press

NOTES

Auxiliary Selection in Italian: A comment of Miozzo and Caramazza's 'On Knowing the Auxiliary of a Verb that Cannot Be Named: Evidence for the Independence of Grammatical and Phonological Aspects of Lexical Knowledge'

David Kemmerer

In a paper published in the 9:1 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Miozzo and Caramazza report the case of an anomic Italian patient (Dante) who is able to retrieve a verb's auxiliary despite being unable to retrieve the verb's phonological form. Because the authors assume that auxiliary selection in Italian is determined solely by arbitrary syntactic features of verbs, they interpret Dante's performance as indicating that the syntactic features of verbs can be accessed independently of their phonological features. The purpose of this short comment is to argue that the authors' conclusion is invalid because their assumption that auxiliary selection is purely syntactic is mistaken; Van Valin (1990) has shown that auxiliary selection can be derived directly from the semantic properties of verbs. I will first summarize Miozzo and Caramazza's study in greater detail, then I will review the evidence that auxiliary selection is semantically based, and finally I will discuss the implications of this evidence for Miozzo and Caramazza's claims.