Italian Nominal Ellipsis in acquisition: an investigation into its identification and locality conditions

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of Italian nominal (NP) ellipsis focusing on two relevant topics related to its licensing mechanism: the identification and the locality conditions, which have been examined adopting two different methodologies. The identification conditions were investigated through the comparison of the lexical and elliptical DPs produced by Italian acquiring children aged 1;05 to 3;04 in their early spontaneous speech (CHILDES) with the goal to determine the relevant property displayed by the determiners (and the possible nominal modifiers) introducing the remnant, which allow to identify and recover the meaning of the NP ellipsis. The results showed that elliptical and lexical DPs were introduced by different types of determiners, a different type of syntactic structure, and different types of nominal modifiers. Moreover, the developmental pattern of elliptical and lexical DPs also proceeded differently and independently. On the other hand, the morphological agreement was found to be similar in both DPs, being target-like from the beginning of Italian children’s productions. The similarities and the differences between the two DPs suggested that while the morphological agreement is a general property which identifies a DP in Italian, the relevant property exhibited by the different types of elliptical DPs is a notion of partitivity, which is revisited in terms of set restriction building upon Bouchard’s (2002) proposal. The locality conditions were investigated through a corpus study on the spontaneous production of object NP ellipsis (CHILDES), followed by three novel picture-supported Truth Value Judgment Tasks (TVJT) targeting the comprehension of the object NP ellipsis by Italian preschool children aged 3;00 to 6;00 with the goal to observe whether and how the principle of locality (Rizzi 1990, 2001, 2004, 2013, 2018) and the further manipulation of different types features (Number, Topic) constrains the acquisition of the object NP ellipsis. The results showed that both the spontaneous production and the comprehension of object NP ellipsis in Italian is affected by locality. In spontaneous production, no lexically restricted subject DP was found as an intervener in the anaphoric dependency between the elided NP and its antecedent. Moreover, the subject NP ellipsis was produced before the object NP ellipsis, showing a subject/object asymmetry in the acquisition of NP ellipsis, as traditionally reported in the A’-dependencies. In comprehension, Italian preschool children’s interpretation of object NP ellipsis was constrained by the absence and the presence of a structural intervener: the meaning of the NP ellipsis in coordination was overall recovered earlier than in discourse. The further manipulation of the Number feature on the intervener and of the Topic feature on the remnant nonetheless showed a difference in the interpretation of discourse NP ellipsis based on the children’s age groups. This result indicated that the amelioration effect arising from the manipulation of an argumental feature as the Number feature is significantly stronger than the one arising from the manipulation of a non-argumental feature as the Topic feature, in line with predicted by a featural approach to locality (Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato, Rizzi 2012; Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009).