Бележки за предмета и задачите на невролингвистиката

The paper reviews briefly some opinions on problems of aphasia ranging from ancient to modern times. What should be the position and scope of neurolinguistics within the system of sciences? Representatives of various schools do not share the same approach to that question. According to some, the objectives of neurolinguistics should be restricted solely to research on pathological phenomena. A more convincing concept, however, is the one which maintains that being a new branch of science, neurolinguistics should study both the processes of coding and decoding of speech as well as the respective deviation types, connected with them. The importance of aphasia studies for the clarification of some problems of general linguistics is emphasized. The paper also serves as an introduction to the article „The Linguistic Description of Aphasia“ published in the same issue of the journal.