Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T00:42:31.488Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The role of discourse pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2005

LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This longitudinal study investigates the distribution of null and overt subjects in the spontaneous production of six Italian-speaking children between the ages of 1 year, 7 months and 3 years, 3 months. Like their peers acquiring other Romance null-subject languages, the children in this sample produced more overt subjects as their mean length of utterance in words (MLUW) increased. Pronominal subjects, and specifically first person pronouns, accounted for an increasingly larger proportion of the overt subjects used. The distribution of both pronominal and lexical subjects was further investigated as a function of the informativeness value of a number of pragmatically relevant features. The results showed that as early as MLUW 2.0 Italian-speaking children can use null and overt subjects in a pragmatically appropriate way. The relevance of these findings is discussed with reference to performance limitation and syntactic accounts of subject omission, and implications are drawn for a model of language development that incorporates the mastery of pragmatics in the acquisition of syntax.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , July 2005 , pp. 437 - 462
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aguado–Orea J., & Pine J. 2002. There is no evidence for a “no overt subject” stage in early child Spanish: A note on Grinstead (2000). Journal of Child Language, 29, 865– 874.Google Scholar
Aissen J. 1999. Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 17, 673– 711.Google Scholar
Allen S. 2000. A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut. Linguistics, 38, 483– 521.Google Scholar
Allen S. (in press). Interacting pragmatic influences on children's argument realization. In M. Bowerman & P. Brown (Eds.), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Allen S., & Schröder H. 2003. Preferred argument structure in early Inuktitut spontaneous speech data. In J. W. Du Bois, L. Kumpf, & W. Ashby (Eds.), Preferred argument structure: Grammar and architecture for function. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Antelmi D. 1997. La prima grammatica dell'italiano: Indagine longitudinale sull'acquisizione della morfosintassi italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Ariel M. 1990. Assessing noun-phrases antecedents. London: Routledge.
Ariel M. 1996. Referring expressions and the +/− coreference distinction. In T. Fretheim & J. Gundel (Eds.), Reference and referent accessibility (pp. 13– 35). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Austin J., Blume M., Parkinson D., Núnez del Prado Z., & Lust B. 1996. Interactions between pragmatic and syntactic knowledge in the first language acquisition of Spanish null and overt pronominals. In J. Lema & E. Trevino (Eds.), Theoretical analyses on Romance languages (pp. 35– 47). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bates E. 1976. Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
Bloom P. 1990. Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguistic Inquiry, 21, 491– 504.Google Scholar
Chafe W. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 25– 55). London: Academic Press.
Chafe W. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chafe W. 1996. Inferring identifiability and accessibility. In T. Fretheim & J. Gundel (Eds.), Reference and referent accessibility (pp. 37– 46). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cipriani P., Pfanner P., Chilosi A. M., Cittadoni l., Ciuti A., Maccari A., Pantano N., Pfanner L., Poli P., Sarno S., Bottari P., Cappelli G., Colombo C., & Veneziano E. 1989. Protocolli diagnostici e terapeutici nello sviluppo e nella patologia del linguaggio (1/84 Ministry of Health). Pisa, Italy: Stella Maris Foundation.
Clancy P. 1993. Preferred argument structure in Korean acquisition. In E. Clark (Ed.), The proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 307– 314). Stanford, CT: CSLI.
Cornish F. 1999. Anaphora, discourse, and understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dimitriadis A. 1995. When pro-drop languages don't: On overt pronominal subjects in Greek. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 2, 45– 60.Google Scholar
Ervin–Tripp S. 1970. Discourse agreement: How children answer questions. In J. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 79– 107). New York: Wiley.
Givón T. 1979. On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Givón T. 1984. Syntax: A functional-typological introduction (Vol. 1). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Greenfield P., & Smith J. H. 1976. The structure of communication in early language development. New York: Academic Press.
Grinstead J. 2000. Case, inflection and subject licensing in child Catalan and Spanish. Journal of Child Language, 27, 119– 156.Google Scholar
Guasti M. T. 2002. Language acquisition. The growth of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Guerriero S., Cooper A., Oshima–Takane Y., & Kuriyama Y. 2001. A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument realisation and omission in English and Japanese children's speech. In A. Do (Ed.), BUCLD 25 Proceedings (pp. 319– 330). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Gundel J. 1996. Relevance theory meets the givenness hierarchy: an account of inferrables. In T. Fretheim & J. Gundel (Eds.), Reference and referent accessibility (pp. 141– 153). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gundel J., Hedberg N., & Zacharski R. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69, 274– 307.Google Scholar
Halliday M., & Hasan R. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Huang Y. 1994. The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora: A study with special reference to Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huang Y. 1995. On null subjects and null objects in generative grammar. Linguistics, 33, 1081– 1123.Google Scholar
Huang Y. 2000. Anaphora: A crosslinguistic study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hyams N. 1986. Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Hyams N., & Wexler K. 1993. On the grammatical basis of null subjects in child language. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 421– 460.Google Scholar
Kempson R. 1996. Semantics, pragmatics and interpretation. In S. Lappin (Ed.), The handbook of contemporary semantic theory (pp. 561– 598). Oxford: Blackwell.
Lambrecht K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson S. 1991. Pragmatic reduction of the binding conditions revisited. Journal of Linguistics, 27, 107– 161.Google Scholar
Levinson S. C. 1987. Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics, 23, 379– 434.Google Scholar
Longobardi G. 1994. Reference and proper names. Linguistic Inquiry, 25, 609– 665.Google Scholar
MacWhinney B. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nelson K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Orsolini M. & Di Giacinto P. 1996. Use of referential expressions in 4-year-old children's narratives: invented versus recalled stories. In C. Pontecorvo, M. Orsolini, B. Burge, & L. Resnick (Eds.), Children's early text construction (pp. 67– 81). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Orsolini M., Rossi F., & Pontecorvo C. 1996. Re-introduction of referents in Italian children's narratives. Journal of Child Language, 23, 465– 486.Google Scholar
Paradis J., & Navarro S. 2003. Subject realization and cross-linguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30, 1– 23.Google Scholar
Pine J., Lieven E., & Rowland C. 1998. Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category. Linguistics, 36, 807– 830.Google Scholar
Serratrice L. (2002, July 16–21). Syntax and pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian. Paper presented at the Ninth meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, University of Madison.
Serratrice L., Sorace A., & Paoli S. 2004. Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax-pragma- tics interface: Subjects and objects in English-Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 183– 205.Google Scholar
Sperber D., & Wilson D. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tomasello M. 2003. Constructing a language. A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Valian V. 1991. Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition, 40, 21– 81.Google Scholar
Valian V., & Eisenberg Z. 1996. The development of syntactic subjects in Portuguese-speaking children. Journal of Child Language, 23, 103– 128.Google Scholar
van Hoek K. 1995. Conceptual reference points: A cognitive grammar account of pronominal anaphora constraints. Language, 71, 310– 340.Google Scholar