Language

LANGUAGE. - In its proper and common meaning, language is spoken speech, the means of expression and communication of thought in man. In a derived sense, language is also referred to as the means of expressing feelings and passions in animals and, more generically still, to the expressive value that things assume through their very presence, for consciousness and thought. Language is finally, as the expression of being in consciousness, the word or logos of the mind: "word" then coincides with "concept."

I. PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

The science whose purpose is to investigate in what relation words, concepts, and things stand to one another; whence words derive their semantic value; what there is in language that is personal and what is universal; what the essence of language is; why language exists or must exist.

Scattered elements of a philosophy of language are present in Plato (Cratylus, 387 ff.) and also in early Christian thought. Theophilus of Antioch, using Stoic terminology, speaks (Ad Autolycum, II, 10 and 22) of λόγος ἐνδιάθετος, the word of the divine mind, God's interior expression to himself, which becomes λόγος προφορικός, that is, the manifested word, first in creation: "Omnia per ipsum facta sunt" (John 1:3), and then in the Incarnation: "Et Verbum caro factum est" (ibid. 1:14). Medieval treatises on logic, in the questions concerning the value of terms, their meaning, their "suppositio," their relation to the other parts of discourse and to concepts and things, sometimes contain opinions and assessments that go beyond simple formal logic and belong to the philosophy of language (cf. William of Ockham, Comment. in I librum Sententiarum, 2.4, M.; Summa totius logicae, I, 63-77).

However, a true and proper philosophy of language arose only in modern thought, and not in an autonomous form. In its brief history, it took on now an idealistic, now a positivistic coloring, according to the general mentality in which it developed. At first, toward the end of the 18th century, W. Humboldt, who was the first to use the term "Sprachphilosophie," in keeping with his fundamental idealism, made great efforts to deduce language from the creative activity of the transcendental I. He considered, in languages, more the activity of the subject than the effect of this activity, more the faculty and the power of expressing oneself in words than the result, the language already existing in the domain of social coexistence. The philosophy of language aimed to demonstrate dialectically how the transcendental I had to possess a means of expressing its own intimate life. Humboldt affirmed that the creative force of the Spirit is the very capacity to produce symbols, to symbolize its own immanent content: without words, reality is chaotic; by creating symbols one creates reality: "Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedankes," op. cit. in bibl., p. 64).

At a second stage the philosophy of language took on a positivistic character and language came to be considered as a given, disregarding its causes. More than a philosophy of language, it was linguistics: the history of words was constructed, genealogical trees were established, in order to trace back, through the modifications, the original stocks. Then, applying the methods of experimental psychology, the mechanism of language was illustrated, the analysis of the linguistic faculty and of its functioning was carried out in order to explain its anomalies and associations.

There followed a revival of the idealistic interpretation. Cassirer (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, I, Berlin 1923, pp. 3-51) elaborated at length the symbolic conception of language already devised by Humboldt. On the one hand the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers and Socrates, Plato, Aristotle would have held that sensations and ideas were intellectual symbols of external objects, without troubling to check whether the symbol had a correspondence with the reality symbolized; on the other hand modern physicists, e.g., Heinrich Hertz, would hold that space, time, mass, force, matter, energy, etc. are nothing but symbols, sketched by the human mind, for mastering the world of sensible experience. Arts, sciences, myths, religions would be forms of the spirit, each creating, on its own account, its own symbols, differing in the manner of their derivation, but all proceeding from a single origin; and they would indicate the paths that the spirit follows in its objectification. The spirit transforms the passive world of bare impressions into the world of pure spiritual expression, by means of the elevation of the particularities of experience to a higher unity. The gods of Greece owe their formation to Hesiod and to Homer: it was the aesthetic beginning of religious thought. The sign or symbol is not a casual envelope of thought, but an essential and necessary organ of it. Language not only communicates the content of thought, but represents that same content, makes it be distinct. Every thought is defined insofar as it is expressed with a word. The acquisition of the sign or symbol represents in the development of the spirit the passage to objectification. Language, science, art and religion offer the stones for building the world of "reality" and the world of the "I."

In the attempt to fuse together the two tendencies, idealistic and positivistic, Karl Bühler (Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, Jena 1934) undertook, in 1934 in Vienna, a comprehensive study of language, considering it in its functioning and in its relations with the integral life of the spirit. He recognizes in it a threefold function: the expressive one, which manifests outwardly the feelings and affections of the subject, and which can be exercised even without distinct articulation of word, common to men, children and animals; the appellative function, which is to say the one that provokes a reaction in the subjects to whom the language is addressed and that awakens in the listener the concepts of the speaker; and a representative function, which manifests outwardly the complex rational and spiritual life exclusive to man. According to these points of view, language would represent the synthesis of the whole man, in his affective life (expressive function), social life (appellative function) and spiritual life (representative function): the philosophy of language could lead to a general philosophy of life and of being.

In Italy, Giulio Bertoni, in polemic with the "scientists" of language, affirmed that the origin of language is not a linguistic problem, but a philosophical and theological problem. The comparison of languages can serve only to discover affinities and resemblances, and even if it should succeed in proving the unity of all the languages currently spoken on earth, there would always remain the doubt that beyond this unity there existed linguistic conditions that no investigation could clarify for lack of data. Moreover, human expression is not only articulated or auditory. Weeping is language, laughter is language, sorrow and joy. To perceive is to speak, to think is to speak. The search for the origin of language is identified with the search for the origin of man. Language is the soul of the tongue, it is the tongue quickened by feeling, by imagination, by the soul. Language reveals itself in the accent, in the timbre, in the music of the tongue. Always the word is accompanied by a movement of the soul. Whoever speaks reveals himself to himself and to others. The tongue is thought, experience, history. As much thought as tongue, as much feeling as language. When the soul is troubled, when one struggles in the effort to clarify the indistinct, then language becomes tongue, and we are freed from our torment. Thought builds itself by building the tongue... Language is creative activity..., it is an arcane fluid that penetrates words and takes them with its magic and draws the spirit to configure itself in them (Lingua e pensiero, Florence 1932, pp. 6, 9, 243). Cantoni does nothing but develop the rigidly idealistic interpretation that B. Croce had already given of language, attributing to language only an aesthetic value and a merely expressive and objective meaning. The science of art and the science of language are not, for Croce, two distinct sciences but one alone; philosophy of art and philosophy of language are the same thing; language is sound organized for the purpose of expression; linguistics, in what it has that is reducible to philosophy, is nothing if not aesthetics (Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale, Bari 1928, pp. 153-66).

Instead, all those present-day interpretations of the nature of language that derive from the movement named after the Vienna Circle, and that constitute the various centers of methodology that have arisen in the Old and the New World — Milan, Turin, London, Chicago — follow the direction of positivism. These centers, and the scholars who belong to them, aim at a positive analysis of language that purifies it of every dross and makes it fit to describe and to transmit objectively and impartially the observations made and the rigorously logical deductions that can be drawn from them. Words are often false divinities, which reduce reason itself to slavery; language often exercises a lyrical function, is often tainted by a naive anthropomorphism (S. Ceccato, Programma per un corso di metodologia, Milan 1946, pp. 3-8). C. Morris in the United States and A. G. Ayer in England reduce the activity of philosophy to the determination of the meaningfulness of assertions, to the exclusion of pseudo-propositions, and to the analysis of meaningful propositions: meaningful are those propositions that are verifiable by an experience, whether actually realizable or at least logically conceivable (v. bibl.).

It appears clearly that in a positivist or neopositivist conception of language, in conformity with the fundamental anti-metaphysical position, not even a possible philosophical problematic of language is suspected. If, therefore, an analysis of language is to be granted, one that purifies it of surreptitious meanings and prevents alogical and uncritical influences upon it; if the effort to create a philosophical and scientific language, one adhering to the concrete conditions that define knowledge, is to be approved, all this nevertheless remains at the margins of an authentic philosophy of language. This asks what language is, according to the various meanings of the term. Whether by it is meant the faculty of the spirit to express itself, and first of all the faculty of expressing itself to itself, the intimate saying of the spirit to itself; whether language is that phase of expression which precedes the very conceptualization of thought, or the very fragmenting of thought into the various modes of expression with which it realizes its act; whether it is lyrical, poetry, art, even before it is concept, logic, words. Beyond the question of language in general, there is that of human language; what its content is, of what spirit it is the expression; whether it is a simple aesthetic expression of the fleeting moment of a spirit in becoming, or whether, alongside the aesthetic expression, enveloped in it, there is a content of universal and necessary value, the reflection of an absolute value. The problem of language then coincides with the fundamental problem of all philosophy: what man is, and what his relationship to the absolute is.

Generally language is not studied as the starting point of a philosophical system; rather its interpretation is inserted and framed within an already constructed and formulated system, and the motives that determine an immanentistic and monistic conception of reality, or a transcendentistic, or historicistic, or existentialistic conception, are different from language. In every conception, however, the twofold aspect of the nature of language can be accepted: the expressive aspect and the communicative aspect. If the second is more obvious, so much so that already Aristotle deduced from the existence of language in men their natural sociability, it is undeniable nevertheless that language would not be communication if it were not first expression, and first of all expression of thought to itself, the ineliminable and irreplaceable fruit of the very activity of thinking, what it conceives, generates, creates, even if it were to communicate with no one, even if it were only self-consciousness. In this sense language also precedes the concept, it is the very capacity for conceptualization; the word, then, spoken or written, is nothing other than the exterior counterpart of the conceptualization that has taken place, whence language is specifically one and the same for all men, just as intelligence and reason are specifically one and the same in them, so that the concepts of being, of substance, of cause, etc. are identical in all men, and the languages are manifold in their diversity. It may be said that language is the fruit of the spontaneity of the spirit and of the tendency of the spirit to objectify itself; and if spontaneity is lyricism, poetry, intuition, in opposition to reflection, to logic, to reasoning, then language is art and not science.

All this may hold for language in general. Human language, however, like the spirit of which it is the expression, has its own qualifications and characteristics. Placed before the concept of the absolute, the human spirit, with its limits, processes, involutions, cannot attribute its characteristics to itself. The only solution to the problem of its essence is therefore of a transcendentistic nature. The characteristics of human language, both in its expressive aspect and in its communicative one, confirm this metaphysical conception. Human language cannot claim for itself, in the expressive phase, an absolute spontaneity. Just as human intelligence is not the absolute and ultimate norm of truth, of goodness, of beauty, and the values that it can actualize are not primary and absolute values, so the expressivity of the human spirit is of a secondary character, is of a participative nature, is measured and normed by a measure and a norm superior to it. The communicative aspect of language, moreover, the possibility and the fact of dialogue, the universality of the object communicated and understood, poses the problem of the relations of the many and the one. And this must be resolved by recourse to a superior unity, which cannot be of the same nature as the many. The twofold aspect of human language confirms the testimony of the spirit, which apprehends itself as the expressive reflection of an objectivity that transcends it. The spirit and human language are inserted into a universal reality and value.

Human language is expressive and communicative only in the proposition. Croce had already noted that expression is an indivisible whole; the noun and the verb do not exist in it, but are abstractions fashioned by man by destroying the only linguistic reality, which is the proposition

(Estetica, p. 138). Words are not communicated except within an affirmation or a negation. The affirmation, moreover, is the expression of being, which the human spirit does not create but apprehends, according to its particular mode of knowing, and in accord with the fundamental exigencies of rational objectivity, the first principles, the condition of the very possibility of dialogue and of language.

Articulate language also has, as such, its own particular value. If the choice of spoken and written words is arbitrary and conventional (the case of onomatopoeic words is an exception), once certain words have been fixed to indicate determinate objects, language assumes its own proper character of stability. The acceptance of words by many constitutes the very possibility of spoken and written language. Stability and acceptance of the meaning of words constitute what is customarily called the juridical value of language, which no one who intends to communicate his own ideas with other thinking subjects can disregard. It encloses within itself a great significance: words have acquired their value through the sifting of the centuries, in the crucible of collective human thought, and only then were they definitively accepted, when the concept that was intended to be expressed corresponded to their exterior meaning.

Words are sign and symbol, but of thought. However diverse the many languages spoken by the human race may be, the unity of language is manifest in them. The common traits existing among them do not always depend, as Schuchardt has shown, on mutual kinship; rather they are due to that element, common to the whole human race, which is thought (H. Delacroix, Le langage et la pensée, Paris 1930, p. 5).

Thought is the principle of objectivity and universality. Therefore, the passage from reality to thought and from thought to language assures the latter of objective value, which becomes juridical through common acceptance. Consequently, it would not seem impossible for philosophy to begin with an examination of language in order to reach truth, completing the reverse path of that by which the spirit [proceeds] to words. The analysis of the meaning contained in language is always of no small importance. Philosophy, investigating this meaning, directs its researches into the most intimate and profound work of thought which, although it had the character of spontaneity, was no less reflective and penetrating in translating the real into words.

Language, even in its completeness and stabilization, involves, like thought itself, margins of uncertainty and indeterminacy, and a progressive evolution of forms. A total knowledge of reality is not possible for human thought, nor will there therefore be an expression perfectly adequate to all the intelligibility of its object. This did not, however, lend support to a passage to forms of absolute anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. If human thought cannot claim an exhaustive knowledge of the real — and in this lies the proof of the transcendent value of being — it nonetheless expresses, in the fabric of its concepts and its forms, the fundamental structure.

A conception of language based on the principles set forth permits a process of language itself toward a philosophy of the real. In every language there are words that express the same concept, for example, that of substance, of transformation, of obligation, and they therefore indicate a universal derivation that cannot have its foundation except in the objectivity of the concept itself. Moreover, in words the diversity with which thought translates reality into concepts is clearly expressed. The distinction between abstract words and concrete words is full of meaning. "Humanity" and "man" do not indicate the same thing. "Humanity" is that which makes a man be "man," but it is not man. The abstract term represents the fruit of an elaboration of thought; the concrete term refers directly to existing reality. Thus from the analysis of the expressive content of words, precisely because words, thought and reality stand together, one can derive, on the example of Aristotle and, even earlier, of Socrates, the general lines of a logic and a metaphysics.

The definition of words as "passionum animae signa," signs of the concepts of the soul, is Aristotle's (Peri hermeneias, I, 1). St. Thomas, commenting on the Aristotelian expression, affirms: "voces significant intellectus conceptiones immediate, et eis mediantibus res": words therefore bear in themselves the imprint of the characteristics of particular human thought: they signify things, but through thought. Aristotle and St. Thomas recognized the abstractive character proper to the human intellect and evident in the formation of language. On these data they constructed the theory of universal concepts, of the transcendence and of the analogy of the concept of being (cf. A. Marc, L'idée de l'être dans s. Thomas, in Archives de philosophie, 10 [1933], fasc. 1, p. 85, and A. Brunner, Sprache als Anfangspunkt der Erkenntnistheorie, in Scholastik, 12 [1933], p. 41). From the analysis of language were determined the supreme and irreducible genera of the beings existing in the corporeal world. From the analysis of temporal expressions, the definition of time was given, the common element contained in them, just as one had arrived at the definition of motion, of space, of number and of quantity from their corresponding expressions. With the analysis of motion and of becoming and of their expressions, there followed the theories of matter and form (v. ILEMORFISMO), of act and potency. Having then recognized in motion the dependence between effect and cause, the principle of causality applied to being was formulated, and from the knowledge of finite being the knowledge of the existence, and, to a limited extent, of the nature of the infinite Being was made possible.

Carlo Giacon

II. NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND PATHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

Of considerable medical-psychological interest is the development of language in the child; through a preliminary stage of babbling (the fallations of French authors), it prepares to use that of adults, both by means of the exercise of the phonatory organs and through the continuous discovery of the relationship between their movement and the hearing of sounds. The period of acquisition of language properly so called generally begins between the 8th and 9th month with a phase of pure comprehension that precedes, even if only slightly, linguistic expression; the child's comprehension is realized at first through global situations; the intonation and melody of the sentence are grasped, rather than its separate elements. With the unfolding of spoken language, the condensation of the sentence into the word and the multiple meaning of the word-sentence will appear more clearly. Imitation will soon destroy the syntax of this pseudo-sentence in which the order of the terms represents the movement of thought proceeding from the essential aspect to the secondary ones. Expressions of will are precocious (2nd year), at least for negation. The language of will, which at the beginning is a simple verbal expression of affective attitudes, rapidly acquires an intellectual value, of negative or assertive judgment. The names of things come afterward. Some authors have insisted on the "intellectual revolution" that takes place when the child discovers that "everything has a name"; Stern affirms that the comprehension of what language is is born abruptly. In reality, however, this development of verbal knowledge seems to be accomplished progressively and regularly; a notable precocity can be determined if the environment offers wise collaboration. After nouns come verbs, at first in the infinitive, but construction intervenes early and the conventions of the language impose themselves; grammatical forms and pronouns come into use. Thus the passage is accomplished from an archaic plane of speech, made of simple emotive expressions, without concepts or judgments, to a language characterized by the use of pronouns, in relation to self-consciousness. Born from emotions and needs, infantile language does nothing but translate the states proper to the ego; but little by little it disengages itself from the purely emotive-volitional aspect to reach that of intellectual ascertainment. Language, at first voluntary, rapidly becomes automatic, in the sense that thought and word seem intimately bound to each other, passing without effort from one into the other.

Disturbances of the evolution of language are: a) audimutism, absence or insufficiency of articulated speech, in children with normal intelligence and hearing; the evolution is favorable, whether spontaneously or with the influence of re-education. It may depend on auditory agnosia or congenital auditory imperception, a very rare form; the essential disturbance consists in the non-comprehension of spoken language, although the organs of phonation and articulation are normal; articulated speech is absent and is replaced by gestures or by a language formed of simple sounds without grammatical rules (idioglossia). Or it may depend on delayed development of praxic functions (v. NERVOSO, SISTEMA); in that case, while verbal comprehension is perfect, in articulated speech there is an impossibility of putting syllables together; there is no individual language, as in auditory agnosia, but the language of the environment is spoken, poorly and in a very deformed manner. b) Deaf-mutism due to peripheral lesion (v. SORDOMUTI). c) Abnormal pronunciation in spoken language, in the form of "lisping," due to the persistence of a phonetic behavior belonging to a less evolved period of the integration of language; or of "stuttering," produced by motor incoordination of the different organs participating in phonation, so that the stutterer seems no longer to know how to breathe while speaking. The onset of this defect is generally slow, around 5 years of age, though at times it can be abrupt (in which case it is made to depend, at least by family members, on an emotional shock). Once established, stuttering presents "clonic" phenomena (repetition of syllables or phonemes, initial of the word or parasitic sounds) and "tonic" phenomena (temporary inability to emit the slightest sound). The defect is generally intermittent, emotions accentuate it; it is exceptional in sung speech. Various etiological factors have been invoked from time to time: hysteria, the neuropathic constitution, an impairment of the central gray nuclei. Stuttering generally does not heal spontaneously; careful re-education is necessary. Language, once acquired, can be compromised in aphasia (v.), a disturbance of the expression or comprehension of verbal symbols, with undeniable intellectual participation, outside of any compromise of the instruments (if instead the cause is the latter, one speaks of dysarthria).

Of particular interest are the psycho-neurological problems linked to the possible relationships between the psychic activity of language and the conditions of determined zones of the cerebral cortex. In 1861 Broca localized the center of articulated language in the foot of the third frontal convolution of the left cerebral hemisphere. Wernicke (1847) described another type of aphasia (sensory aphasia) due to lesion of the first temporal convolution, manifesting itself with non-comprehension of language, while speech, though full of errors, was free and abundant. With Bastian and with Wernicke opens the era of the diagram-makers (Head), that is, of those who described multiple storehouse-centers of images in relation to a hypothetical superior "ideogenic center"; thus numerous varieties of aphasias were illustrated (Kleist) which were framed in schemas, all more or less artificial: those proposed by Kussmaul, Lichtheim, Charcot, Grasset were the best known. In 1906, a memorable date in the history of aphasia, Pierre Marie, the "iconoclast," demolished the classical theory of the centers of verbo-acoustic and verbo-articulate images; the disturbances of the comprehension of language in Wernicke's sensory aphasia are purely and simply disturbances of intelligence, general and special. With Head, who denies the existence of verbal images and considers aphasia as a disturbance of "internal language," that is, of the symbolic formulation of thought, one passes clearly from neurology to psychology. In recent years there has come to be delineated, ever more marked, the opposition between noetists and antinoetists; on the one hand, that is, it is admitted that a general modification of thought lies at the basis of aphasic disturbances, while on the other the disturbance of language is considered as primary, with merely secondary repercussion on thought.

Among the principal noetists, after P. Marie, Gelb and Goldstein are above all to be remembered; these, applying the principles of Gestalttheorie to the psychopathology of aphasia, upheld the most important current noetic theory, according to which the aphasic is not simply "a man whose language is modified," but "a modified man" in his entirety, regressed toward a more primitive behavior. In aphasics there are missing above all words with generic meaning, while only proper names remain, that is, those names that serve to designate the singularities of things, not the categories; the alteration of this fundamental function, which is called categorial behavior (Gelb and Goldstein), power of symbolic expression (Head), function of mediatization (Van Woorkom), will determine an alteration of the representative function of language.

According to Goldstein, in ordinary language three different modalities are fused together: representational language (Jackson's intellectual language), the first to be altered by cerebral lesions; expressive language (Jackson's emotional language), the best preserved in the event of cerebral lesion; and verbal knowledge, consisting of the very varied forms of motor and sensory memory, inner language, etc. Set in motion by voluntary intentions, the operations that depend on them then continue automatically, or almost so, because they are "commanded by the global psychic situation." This last portion, that is, verbal knowledge, seems to be in relation with a precise cerebral localization, the speech zone, and represents a means of rescue when the categorial aptitude is lost; in this way the word can be evoked either directly and in a wholly external manner by the presence of the object, or by means of a "detour," through the memories that are linked to perceptions thanks to verbal knowledge. When the word has lost its value as a sign, an external verbal knowledge can, in certain individuals particularly gifted from the point of view of speech, partly compensate for the loss of representational language. In motor aphasia, the distinctness of the disturbances of verbal knowledge allows one to see in this the result of a motor learning. In recent years a certain anti-noetistic reaction has occurred, although one cannot say that genuine theories have been elaborated; the importance of the linguistic deficit has been effectively emphasized by Isserlin, von Kuenburg, Lotmar. Indeed Lotmar's recent critique (1937) of Goldstein's conception shows with great clarity how difficult, if not impossible, it is to consider aphasia as resulting from the loss of categorial behavior.

As regards nosographic classification, for Marie aphasia is one single thing and it is Wernicke's aphasia; the disturbances of articulated language fall within "anarthria," a purely articulatory disturbance; Broca's aphasia is nothing but total aphasia, that is, Wernicke's aphasia plus anarthria. Dejerine and his school, on the other hand, maintain a predominantly motor aphasia, Broca's aphasia, and an aphasia of comprehension or sensory aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia; total aphasia represents the association of the two types. Mingazzini seeks to reconcile the classical conceptions with those of Marie.

Today the most important systematization of the disturbances of language is that of Head, whose classification is purely phenomenological. He speaks of: a) verbal aphasia, corresponding to the motor aphasia of the classics, given by the impossibility or difficulty of forming words or describing them; the evocation of the word is difficult, the vocabulary limited, inner language is affected; there is a disturbance in the comprehension of the content of sentences read silently; verbal expression is deficient, but it is not a simple anarthria (or pure, subcortical motor aphasia); b) syntactic aphasia, corresponding clinically to Pick's agrammatism; it is a disturbance of the distribution of words in the formation of sentences; the word is not impeded; relational words are missing (articles, conjunctions, etc.); the resemblance to infantile language is clear; silent reading and writing are little affected; comprehension is variable; complex commands may not be understood; c) aphasia nominum or amnestic, a disturbance of the comprehension of the nominal value of words, spoken and written; the patient is incapable of naming familiar objects, although he can describe their use or their composition; d) semantic aphasia, a defect in the complete recognition of words and sentences; there is no difficulty in forming or repeating words, but, in the course of conversation, sentences are incomplete, as if one had forgotten what was to be said; words or sentences are understood, but the meaning of the whole escapes one; reading is possible, but the sense of the words read is not completely grasped; writing is often altered.

With regard to the anatomical problems, agreement has today been reached on two points: the importance of the left hemisphere, whose lesions are those that most often determine disturbances of language; the existence of two "language zones": an anterior one (Broca's region), whose lesions determine disturbances of the expressive function of language, and a posterior one (Wernicke's region and the region of the curved fold), whose impairment produces predominantly disturbances of comprehension.

The classics, following Charcot, divided the anterior zone into two centers: the "Broca center" (center of the motor images of articulation) and the "Exner center" (center of the graphic motor images); in the posterior zone they distinguished the "center of auditory images" and the "center of visual images"; these centers would be united to one another by means of association fibers. While sociocortical aphasias or pure aphasias would arise from lesions of the projection fibers, transcortical aphasias would be due to lesions of the association fibers between the centers or of those fibers that connect such centers with the hypothetical "idiosyncratic centers."

To this classical conception modifications have been made, both as regards terminology and as regards the anatomical seat of the centers; the very notion of center (v. LOCALIZZAZIONI CEREBRALI), subsequently, was rejected, because it implies a static, preformed character, and it was preferred to speak of "zones of aphasia." In any case, both Head and the "Gestaltists" (Goldstein) admit the importance of the anatomical seat in determining the characteristics of the morbid process.

With regard to causes, the aphasias may depend on vascular events, on neoplasms, on cranial traumas, on ascensions; in organic dementias aphasia may arise, as also in general paralysis (v. DEMENZA), especially in Lissauer's form; in presenile dementias (Pick's disease and Alzheimer-Perusini disease) aphasia represents one of the typical and fundamental symptoms, together with agnosopraxic symptoms (Reich's alogic syndrome).

At a superficial examination, an aphasic, especially if sensory, may be mistaken for a demented patient; but it will suffice to observe with a little attention the behavior of the subject, both spontaneous and in response to stimulus, in order to avoid the diagnostic error.

Bruno Callieri