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Abstract
In this paper we document the developmental trajectory of the complementizer system (CP-system) in Italian by looking at the earliest spontaneous production of eleven young children, whose transcriptions are available on CHILDES. We conducted a novel corpus analysis, tracking down a number of constructions in which the clausal left-periphery is activated. First, we considered the appearance of the different complementizer particles in the CP-system, which overtly realize the three distinct functional projections ForceP, IntP, and FinP. The analysis revealed that children acquiring Italian correctly use these complementizer particles already in the third year of life. Second, we looked for the simultaneous activation of different functional projections within the CP-system. We went through our corpus searching for complex sentences in which more than one constituent was moved to the left periphery. This option is allowed by the adult grammar of Italian and, as our search revealed, it is also attested in the grammar of young children. Soon after their second birthday, sequences in which a left-dislocated Topic and a Wh- element co-occur are attested, directly supporting the existence of a (high) Topic position above FocusP. Moreover, movement in general conforms to the constraints of the adult grammar, with no attested violation of obligatory inversion (a consequence of the Q-Criterion). Importantly, “why-questions” did not require inversion, much as in the adult grammar of Italian. Taken together, children's use of complementizer particles and their activation of multiple landing sites for movement show that 2-year-olds already possess a richly articulated functional structure of the CP-system, aligned to the layered adult structure. In concluding the paper, we also discuss some temporal differences between constructions activating high and low portions of the CP-system. In particular, we detect a temporal precedence for wh-questions over why-questions. Since the former activate a lower projection, this is consistent with the recently proposed Growing Trees hypothesis, according to which the development of the CP-system proceeds stepwise.
Highlights
Looking at children’s spontaneous productions, a quick albeit gradual development can be observed in the morphosyntactic complexity of their early sentences
The individual variation on how early embedded structures appear is remarkable, but from our search it emerged that Italian children start using sentential embedding soon after their second birthday, with many of them already employing the whole inventory of complementizer particles
Cartographic research showed that the CP-system should be split into a sequence of functional elements (Rizzi, 1997), much as the IP system (Cinque, 1999). These findings raise questions for language acquisition: how and when are these complex configurations acquired by the learner? In this paper we tried to address these questions for the development of the CP-system in Italian
Summary
Looking at children’s spontaneous productions, a quick albeit gradual development can be observed in the morphosyntactic complexity of their early sentences. Other elements like Perché (Why) in matrix clauses are base generated in Spec/IntP, a head which presumably is inherently endowed with the feature +Q, the satisfaction of the Q-Criterion does not require movement of the inflected verb, so that the subject (or other material) can occur in between (see Rizzi, 2001 and much subsequent work for analysis of this pattern, and Thornton, 2008 for evidence that some children acquiring English go through an “Italian” stage, not requiring inversion with why questions) The grammaticality of both (14) and (15) with and without a preverbal subject illustrates this point:. The absence of the ungrammatical construction in (12), together with the alternation in (14–15) would be telling about the early left-periphery: if children at age 2 already hypothesized its articulated structure with distinct positions for IntP and Q/FocP (we will continue to use this label to refer to the landing site of regular wh-movement), we predict that they will require inversion, but in a selective manner: inversion will be obligatorily found only for wh-constituents that sits in Q/Foc, but not in why questions
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