Abstract
This paper re-examines data from Italian children that Antinucci and Miller (1976) used to demonstrate a stage of obligatory object agreement — a stage representing a significant failure of correspondence between children's developing grammars and the target adult grammar. We interpret the relevant utterances as consistent with the target grammar, and argue that this is a more plausible construal. We also present an elicited production study which corroborates our interpretation. We replicate the kind of data Antinucci and Miller report and in gaps in their corpus. Our interpretation of the data thus crucially undermines the positions of both Antinucci and Miller (1976) and Borer and Wexler (1992). They use the object agreement to support theoretical claims violating the hypothesis that developing grammars obey the constraints of Universal Grammar throughout.
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We are especially grateful to Giovanna Albertelli for her help in this research, and also to the parents and children in Parma and Bologna, Italy, who participated in our study. We thank Andy Barss, Paul Bloom, Merrill Garrett, Jane Grimshaw, Dana McDaniel, Janet Nicol, Amy Weinberg, and the University of Maryland Linguistics Department for helpful discussions on this work. We also profited from our reviewers' comments, and we thank them. Our title can be translated ‘The clitic: It's there but you don't see it’.
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Mckee, C., Emiliani, M. Il clitico: C'è ma non si vede. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 10, 415–437 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133369
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133369