Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Italian Sluicing: The Role of Number Mismatch

Sluicing is the ellipsis phenomenon in which the sentential portion of a question CP is elided, leaving only a wh-phrase remnant (1) (Ross 1969; Merchant 2001). (1) John ate something, but I don’t know what Whereas the only element which receives lexicalization in (1) is the wh- pronoun, what, all other sentential elements, i.e. the subject and the predicate, are phonologically missing, even though they are interpreted as John and ate, respectively. Although sluicing has received quite a lot of attention among scholars, the theoretical debate concerning the syntactic nature of the elided material in sluiced sentences is still open. Roughly, two main lines of analysis can be identified, differing in whether they assume a syntactic representation at the ellipsis site of sluices. Non-structural approaches (e.g. Culicover & Jackendoff 2005) do not posit underlying syntactic material at the ellipsis site of sluices, whereas all structural accounts, despite diverging on the technicalities, advocate for the presence of an underlying question CP at the ellipsis site of sluices (e.g. Merchant 2001; Johnson 2001; Kimura 2010; Cinque 2012). This paper asks whether sluiced sentences involve a full-fledged question CP in the syntax and are therefore regulated by the locality principle of featural Relativized Minimality (fRM: Rizzi 2004, 2013, 2018). To this end, we investigated children’s comprehension of sluicing in Italian, a language where, apart from NP-ellipsis (Tasinato & Sanfelici 2023, 2024), the acquisition of elliptical constructions has not been previously examined. By manipulating the Number feature, we demonstrate that the acquisition of Italian sluicing is modulated by fRM, which applies independently of lexicalization.