Children’s subjects in clitic left dislocations in Italian

Abstract

The study examined the production of subjects by Italian-speaking children in different pragmatic contexts which elicited the use of Clitic Left Dislocations (ClLD), pronoun structures and passives. The analysis takes into account the data from Belletti & Manetti (2019) and focuses on the use of lexical and null subjects on the basis of the discourse conditions provided in two elicited production experiments. The results showed that children are adult-like in their use of lexical and pronominal null subjects in different structures. Experiment 1 specifically confirms this ability as children mainly used overt lexical subjects in order to be completely informative about which character performed a given action on the object topic patient. In Experiment 2, however, children displayed a different choice in subject selection, overwhelmingly preferring null plural subjects with a generic interpretation in their ClLDs, resulting in Obj-pro.pl-Cl V sentences. Under the featural Relativized Minimality principle, we suggest that this choice, which led to overall felicitous answers, was preferred since it made the subject in their ClLDs somewhat lighter and created a feature disjunction configuration which is fully mastered by children. Overall, this study investigated how monolingual children deal with the use of different types of subjects in a production study and could provide a baseline measure to extend the analysis to bilingual or L2 production of overt lexical vs. null pronominal subjects in the specific context of ClLDs.