The acquisition of Italian sluicing: evidence for a PF-deletion analysis

This thesis project focuses on the acquisition of elliptical indirect wh-questions, i.e., sluicing, by Italian preschool children, aged 3-6 years. The main goal is to gain new insights from children’s data to determine the most suitable approach to the nature of the syntactic material underlying the sluicing site. To this end, we conducted three experimental studies to investigate (i) whether sluiced interrogatives are more challenging than their unelided counterparts for children, and (ii) whether the locality principle of Relativized Minimality (Rizzi, 1990; 2001; 2004; 2018) constrains the acquisition of sluicing. To achieve this, we employed a yes/no-question task adapted from Mateu & Hyams (2021) to Italian, and we compared children’s performance on sluiced sentences and their lexicalized counterparts (Experiment 1). Additionally, our second and third experiments examined children’s acquisition of subject and object sluices, with the aim of verifying whether the subject>object asymmetry found by Mateu & Hyams (2021) for English sluicing appears in Italian as well. However, no prior studies have investigated whether a featural intersection configuration mitigates intervention effects in sluicing as it does in other A-bar dependencies (e.g., Friedmann et al., 2009; Belletti et al., 2012; a.o.). Therefore, we manipulated the lexical restriction (Experiment 2) and the number feature (Experiment 3), which have been found to be relevant for the computation of locality in Italian (Belletti et al., 2012; Rizzi, 2018; a.o.), thereby creating either an intersection or an inclusion configuration in the sluices. Our results showed that younger children struggle more with elliptical sentences compared to embedded lexicalized wh-questions. Moreover, object sluices pose greater challenges than subject sluices, thereby providing additional evidence for the robust subject>object asymmetry that has been found for A-bar dependencies across numerous languages. However, intervention effects caused by the subject appear to be mitigated when object sluices involve an intersection configuration rather than an inclusion configuration, arguably due to the effect of Relativized Minimality. This is further supported by a preliminary investigation we conducted on the Italian corpora available in the CHILDES database, suggesting that these results cannot be attributed solely to the frequency of sluices in children's input, given their sparse occurrence in child-directed speech. Therefore, a grammatical explanation based on the syntax of the material underlying the sluicing site needs to be considered to account for children’s performance. Our findings suggest that Italian sluicing is compatible with a PF-approach (Ross, 1969; Merchant, 2001, a.o.), which involves the movement of the wh-remnant to the Spec,CP/Spec,FocP, thereby surviving the deletion operation that affects the remainder portion of a full-fledged syntactic structure underlying the sluicing site. Moreover, our data indicate that, when an isomorphic structure constitutes a possible source for sluices, Italian sluicing involves an underlying wh-embedded interrogative. In contrast, non-isomorphic structures that theoretically could serve as plausible sources of Italian sluices (i.e., copular clauses and wh-clefts) do not align with Italian children's performance and may only remain available as Last Resort options (van Craenenbroeck, 2010) when an isomorphic structure cannot be invoked as the source of Italian sluicing.