Agenda

27 Apr 2021 17:30

Truncation vs Reduction in development

Online

VeReWebLing - Venice Research Webinar in Linguistics
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https://unive.zoom.us/j/87511853483

Truncation vs Reduction in development.

Adriana Belletti
(Università di Siena)
 
The starting point is the following seemingly contradictory observation, based on robust results from acquisition studies over several years: whereas young children are known to undergo a period in which they may use reduced portions of the clause structure in early stages, as in e.g. the Root infinitive/RI
stage (up to around 3 years of age; Rizzi 1993/94 and much subsequent work), other reduced structures possible in adult grammars do not appear to be equally accessible to them, also in later stages (6 and later). Reduced relative clauses are a case in point. Results from elicited production studies in the domain of relative clauses have indicated (Contemori & Belletti 2014, Belletti & Chesi
2014 for Italian) that children virtually never produce reduced passive object relatives/PORs (when an object relative is elicited; Belletti 2017), in contrast with adults who resort to this structure a lot in the same experimental conditions (as in e.g. il bambino abbracciato dalla mamma). The talk will address
the issue as to why this should be so, and what difference(s) between the two reduced structures may ultimately be held responsible for and be at the source of this clear developmental divide. (extended abstract attached)

Adriana Belletti is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Siena. Her main research has focused over the years on generative comparative morpho-syntax and on different modes of language acquisition – monolingual, bi/multilingual, adult and child-L2 – and forms of language pathologies within a grammar-based
approach. She is the author of several publications, including the 2015 volume with Maria Teresa Guasti The Acquisition of Italian. Morphosyntax and its interfaces in different modes of acquisition, Language Acquisition and Language Disorders series /LALD series, John Benjamins Publishing Company, and the 2021 volume Smuggling in Syntax, co-edited with Chris Collins for which they wrote a joint introduction and independent chapters, recently published in the Oxford Series in Comparative Syntax.

Lingua

L'evento si terrà in inglese

Organizzatore

Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati

Allegati

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