The Role of Agreement Morphology in the Licensing of the Italian Nominal Ellipsis: Insights from Acquisition Data

This paper investigates the spontaneous production of nominal (NP) ellipsis by typically developing Italian acquiring children with the aim to verify the role of morphological agreement as licensing factor of the Italian NP ellipsis. The present study adds to previous acquisition research verifying whether the DP-internal agreement is the relevant condition which legitimates the NP ellipsis in Italian, a language where the licensing conditions of the NP ellipsis has not been yet investigated. We asked two specific research questions: (Q1) What are the agreement patterns in the elliptical and lexical DPs? (Q2) What is the timing of production of lexical and elliptical DPs? As for (Q1) the results of our study showed that the determiners and the adjectives of Italian remnants of NP ellipsis displayed target morphological agreement in gender and number with the elided NP from the beginning of children’s productions. These findings strongly indicate that the DP-internal agreement is not problematic to acquire by Italian children. As for (Q2), our results revealed that the first instance of NP ellipsis in Italian were found at 1;07 and that no child produced a remnant of NP ellipsis (with target DP-internal agreement) without having produced a lexical DP (with target DP-internal agreement). Since both lexical and elliptical DPs displayed correct DP-internal agreement from the beginning of Italian children’s productions, we conclude that it is not possible to establish a cause-effect relationship between the two DPs and, consequently, to evaluate the role of morphological agreement as trigger to produce the NP ellipsis. Moreover, the peculiar order of production between lexical and elliptical DPs seems to demonstrate that there is syntactic structure in the ellipsis site, whereby the NP is syntactically projected in the DP and then deleted at PF, in line with the most recent analyses of NP ellipsis (Merchant 2001; Cinque 2012).