Functional categories, agrammatism and language acquisition

This paper incorporates an attempt to provide an alternative structural account of agrammatism based on recent developments in the Principles and Parameters framework. It is argued that these developments now make it possible to draw a theoritically-based and empirically viable distinction between impaired categories and the spared categories. It is argued further that the deficit underlying agrammatism results on generation of an impoverished structure of sentence, which lacks functional categories altogether.