Abstract
In this chapter, we analyze the syntax of nominal expressions in a corpus of early child speech collected at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. We focalize on the distribution of quantifiers, determiner-like adjectives, possessive adjectives, and descriptive adjectives. In adult Italian, these elements display a great degree of variation as regards word order. Comparing child production with both the input attested in our corpus and the data found in an electronic corpus of spoken Italian (Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato, LIP, De Mauro et al. 1993), we show that child competence mirrors the adult competence of the spoken register in both syntax and pragmatics and is expectedly deviant from more formal varieties which are usually also taken into account by linguistic literature. From a methodological point of view, we ground our analysis on a well-developed theoretical approach to nominal structure which enables us to make a qualitative analysis in the absence of a large amount of data, as is in fact the case of adjectival modification in child production.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The five macro-types of spoken genres are defined as follows (cf. http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/badip/badip/26_typeText.php, April 30th 2008):
Type A. Bidirectional face-to-face free turn-taking communicative exchange, Type B. Bidirectional non-face-to-face free turn-taking communicative exchange, Type C. Bidirectional face-to-face non-free turn-taking communicative exchange, Type D. Unidirectional communicative exchange in the presence of the receiver, Type E. Unidirectional or bidirectional communicative exchange at a distance.
- 2.
It is interesting to observe that of the two synonyms tanto and molto, only the former appears in our corpus. This mirrors the results found in the LIP corpus, in which tanto is more frequent than molto (376 vs. 245) in all kinds of spoken genres; the difference becomes more dramatic if the inquiry is restricted to free turn-taking texts, in which tanto scores 122 and molto only 40. It is therefore not surprising that children use the most frequent form of the colloquial register.
- 3.
In the Diana corpus of the CHILDES database (Calambrone, see Cipriani et al. 1989), we also find altro cooccurring with a demonstrative:
(i)
MOT:
questa? (%act: Gives the cooker to DIA)
this [one]?
CHI:
eh quetta no.
(%gpx: pointing)
Diana 2;0.02
eh this no
‘Oh not this one.’
CHI:
quett’atta quett’atta ! (%gpx: pointing)
this other [one] this other [one]
‘this other one’
- 4.
Notice that the very sequence in bocca tua is idiomatic and can only be interpreted metaphorically, meaning “if said by you”. It cannot have the literal interpretation “in your mouth” which is the inkaded meaning of (35a) and would correspond to nella tua bocca in the adult language. It is also highly improbable that the child has been exposed to such an idiom, which occurs only once in the LIP corpus and not even with a possessive adjective. What the child has certainly been exposed to is the determinerless prepositional phrase in bocca, which contains a non-overt inalienable possessor typical of Italian. The child’s production is non-target only as far as the realization of the possessor is concerned.
- 5.
The only example of mamma mia ‘oh dear!’ is an exclamation produced as a repetition:
(i)
ANT:
mamma mia
CHI:
mamma mia # è caduto [%exp: il dentifricio]
Sara 2;3.20
mother my [it] is fallen [the toothpaste]
‘Oh my dear, it fell down.’
- 6.
Antelmi (1997: 90–92) claims that in the Camilla corpus, postnominal possessives come later. She reaches this conclusion excluding from her analysis a number of cases of ‘N – Poss’ which she interprets as instances of predicative possessives with copula omission.
- 7.
One child in our corpora produced one nationality adjective (italiano) as a repetition, and one classificatory adjective (spaziale) spontaneously:
(i)
a.
cd italiano
Ernesto, 2;5,01
‘Italian cd’
b.
aer(e)o spaziale
Ernesto, 2;4.02
‘space aircraft’
- 8.
The prenominal position of certain classes of adjectives in high and written registers can be related to the fact that in Old Italian, more prenominal adjectives were possible than in Modern Italian (cf. Giusti 2010).
- 9.
Two postnominal adjectives are indeed very rare also in adult speech. We have found none in the input to Sara.
- 10.
In isolation, stage-level adjectives are present since the very first files:
(i)
a.
totto [=rotto ]
Gaia 1;6.29
broken
b.
uadda [= guarda] focca [=sporca]
Sara 1;9.7
look!
dirty
‘Look, it is dirty.’
The same is true of English (Blackwell 2000, 2005). This shows that the observed delay is not due to a delayed lexical acquisition of the class of stage-level adjectives, as is instead the case with other classes of adjectives (quantity, Section 2.1, ordinal, Section 4.3, classificatory, nationality, shape, Section 4.5).
References
Ambrosi, Carlotta. 2007. Some aspects of the cognitive and linguistic development of a two-year-old child. Tesi di laurea. Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Antelmi, Donella. 1997. La prima grammatica dell’italiano. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Bernardini, Petra. 2004. L’italiano come prima e seconda (madre)lingua. Indagine longitudinale sullo sviluppo del DP. Etudes romanes de Lund 71. Lund: Lunds Universitet.
Blackwell, Aleka 2000. On the acquisition of the syntax of English adjectives. In CLS36: The Panels. The Proceedings from the Panels of the Chicago Linguistic Society’s Thirty-Sixth Meeting, vol. 36–2, eds. Arika Okrent and John P. Boyle, 361–375. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago.
Blackwell, Aleka 2005. Acquiring the English adjective lexicon: relationships with input properties and adjectival semantic typology. Journal of Child Language 32: 535–562.
Caprin, Claudia, and Maria Teresa Guasti. 2006. A cross-sectional study on the use of “be” in early Italian. In The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages, eds. Vincent Torrens and Linda Escobar, 117–133. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Cardinaletti, Anna. 1998. On the deficient/strong opposition in possessive systems. In Possessors, predicates, and movement in the determiner phrase, eds. Artemis Alexiadou and Christopher Wilder, 17–53. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Cardinaletti, Anna, and Giuliana Giusti. 2006. The syntax of quantified phrases and quantitative clitics. In The blackwell companion to syntax, vol. V, eds. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 23–93. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Chierchia, Gennaro, Maria Teresa Guasti, and Andrea Gualmini. 1999. Nouns and articles in child grammar and the syntax/semantics map. Paper presented at GALA, Postdam.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1994. On the evidence for partial N movement in the Romance DP. In Paths towards universal grammar. Studies in honour of Richard S. Kayne, eds. Guglielmo Cinque et al., 85–110. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2005. Deriving Greenberg’s Universal 20 and its exceptions. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 315–332.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2007. The syntax of adjectives. A comparative study. Ms., Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Cipriani, Paola, Pietro Pfanner, Anna M. Chilosi, Lorena Cittadoni, Alessandro Ciuti, Anna Maccari, Lucia Pfanner, Paola Poli, Stefania Sarno, Piero Bottari, Giuseppe Cappelli, C. Colombo and E. Veneziano. 1989. Protocolli diagnostici e terapeutici nello sviluppo e nella patologia del linguaggio (1/84 Italian Ministry of Health), Stella Maris Foundation.
De Mauro, Tullio, Federico Mancini, and Massimo Vedovelli. 1993. Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato. Milano: Etas Libri.
Dixon, Robert M.W. 1982. Where have all the adjectives gone? The Hague: Mouton.
Ferrari, Chiara. 2007. Noun phrases and functional categories in early child production. Tesi di laurea. Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Frawley, William. 1992. Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Friedmann, Naama, and Yosef Grodzinsky. 1997. Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language 56: 397–425.
Gesmundo, Daniela. 2007. Some aspects of the linguistic development of an Italian child. Tesi di laurea. Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Giusti, Giuliana. 2006. Parallels in clausal and nominal periphery. In Phases of interpretation, ed. Mara Frascarelli, 163–184. Berlin: Mouton.
Giusti, Giuliana. 2010. Il sintagma aggettivale. In Grammatica dell’italiano antico, eds. Giampaolo Salvi and Lorenzo Renzi, 593–616. Bologna: il Mulino.
Giusti, Giuliana, and Roberta Gozzi. 2006. The acquisition of determiners: Evidence for the full competence hypothesis. In Language acquisition and development: Proceedings of GALA 2005, eds. Adriana Belletti et al., 232–237. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Gozzi, Roberta. 2004. The acquisition of determiners. A longitudinal study on an Italian child. Tesi di Laurea. Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Longobardi, Giuseppe. 1994. Reference and proper names: a theory of N-movement in syntax and logical form. Linguistic Inquiry 25: 609–665.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1994. Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 3: 371–393.
Zampolli, Serena. 2007. Adjectives and Winnie Pooh: On the input for first language acquisition. Tesi di laurea. Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Zucchet, Silvia. 2008. L’acquisizione del sintagma nominale in una bambina italiana. Tesi di laurea. Venice: University Ca’ Foscari of Venice.
Acknowledgments
This paper has been presented at the XXX GLOW Workshop on Language Acquisition Optionality in the Input: Children’s Acquisition of Variable Word Order, held in Tromsø on April 11, 2007, at the University of Trondheim on April 16, 2007, at the University of Geneva on April 30, 2007, and at the Seconda giornata di Linguistica applicata Acquisizione del linguaggio e disturbi linguistici dell’età evolutiva, held at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice on June 1, 2007. We thank the audiences for comments and criticism. In particular we thank Adriana Belletti, Petra Bernardini, Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova, Maria Teresa Guasti, Gabriella Hermon, and the editors of this volume for very helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cardinaletti, A., Giusti, G. (2011). The Acquisition of Adjectival Ordering in Italian. In: Anderssen, M., Bentzen, K., Westergaard, M. (eds) Variation in the Input. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9207-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9207-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9206-9
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9207-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)