The uses of clitic si in Child Italian

Chiara Dal Farra; Silvia Silleresi; Artemis Alexiadou; Uli Sauerland; Maria Teresa Guasti

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.597

The uses of clitic si in Child Italian

Authors

Chiara Dal Farra University of Milano-Bicocca https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9226-5644
Silvia Silleresi University of Milano-Bicocca https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6733-8733
Artemis Alexiadou Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6790-232X
Uli Sauerland Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics
Maria Teresa Guasti University of Milano-Bicocca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4470-4187

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Abstract

This paper investigates the different uses of the clitic si in Child Italian. Through a corpus study on spontaneous productions of children aged 1;4-3;4, we check whether all functions of si are realized by children and we give a new perspective from language acquisition to a long-standing debate, namely whether there exists only one type of si or whether there are many different ones. Our results show that Italian children use si productively and adult-like early on, and they produce all its different functions: impersonal, anticausative, true reflexive, and inherent reflexive – although at different rates. We claim that our results support the one si approaches, and the difference in the frequencies of si functions reflects the structural complexity of some structures.

Keywords

clitic si, Italian, first language acquisition, impersonal, syntax

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The uses of clitic si in Child Italian

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