Locality Effects in the Acquisition of Nominal Ellipsis: Evidence from Italian Children’s Spontaneous Production

This paper investigates whether the principle of locality constrains the spontaneous production of nominal (NP) ellipsis by three typically developing monolingual Italian-acquiring children (age range 1;05-2;05) available in the CHILDES database(MacWhinney, 2000). We ask whether early productions of elliptical nominal phrases are constrained by locality. In so doing, we aim at verifying whether RM operates in the anaphoric dependency involved in NP ellipsis, which crucially does not imply movement, as it does in A’-chains. Meanwhile, our paper contributes to previous acquisition research on NP ellipsis, by describing the formal properties of the remnants of NP ellipsis in children’s early production, thus adding Italian to the languages investigated so far.