The Emergence of English Elliptical Remnants: an investigation of Lara's spontaneous speech.

The present longitudinal study investigates the morphosyntactic development and distribution of nominal elliptical remnants in English children. Specifically this research addresses four main questions. Firstly, we investigated the structural typology of remnants in child production (Q1); secondly, we analysed the developmental side of remnants produced by the target child (Q2); thirdly, we evaluated the morphosyntactic mismatches within remnants in Lara’s production (Q3). Lastly, we considered the distribution of remnants in adult production (Q4). In order to answer our questions, we analysed the spontaneous production of one monolingual native English-speaker between the ages of 1;09.13 and 3;03.25, collecting empirical data through the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000). Furthermore, we collected the elliptical input provided by caregivers to determine the extent to which adult models drive the acquisition process. In addition, we explored previous research on the nature of the ellipsis site (Structure Question, Identity Question and Licensing Question) and on the licensing conditions of Nom-E in children, providing a comparison between our collected data and earlier investigations. Our findings reveal a high degree of linguistic autonomy in the target child. The acquisition of nominal ellipsis in children is not a passive imitation of adult input. Instead, it is a complex process driven by exploiting the interplay between the architecture of the nominal left periphery (Merchant, 2001; Ntelitheos, 2004; Rizzi, 2004, 2018, Tasinato and Sanfelici, 2024) and the pragmatic constraint of the Discourse Integration (Wijnen et al., 2004).