摘要：Evidence abound that brain damage due to stroke often results in language
impairment. However, there is no reported linguistic study, as far as we know, on the
impact of stroke on either the English or Yoruba speech of a Yoruba-speaking patient
in Nigeria. The main objective of the present study, therefore, is to find out the effect
of brain damage, resulting from stroke, on the English speech of a Yoruba-speaker of
English as a second language. In the present paper, we report and analyze syntactic
disturbances in the speech of a 58-year-old female stroke patient who was diagnosed
as having expressive aphasia. Although the result of her language performance
shows that the patient¡¯s speech was grammatically deviant in that she often omitted
some grammatical items like auxiliaries, articles, prepositions and pronouns, contrary
to known characteristics of agrammatic patients (cf. expressive aphasia), she could
still use some grammatical items in their proper syntactic environments. However, her
speech manifested some evidence of selection errors in the use of the first person
personal pronoun.
