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Cinque, G. (1999). Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford University Press.
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Radford, A. (1988). Small Children's Small Clauses. Transactions of the Philological Society, 86(1), 1–43.
Keywords: small clauses, acquisition
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Bottari, P., Cipriani, P., Chilosi, A. M., & Pfanner, L. (2001). The Italian Determiner System in Normal Acquisition, Specific Language Impairment, and Childhood Aphasia. Brain and Language, 77, 283–293.
Abstract: The paper presents a comparison of the development of the Italian determiner system in three different populations: normally developing children, a child recovering from childhood aphasia from the age of 3 years, 9 months, and 11 specific language impairment (SLI) children. Data from Italian normal children provide evidence for the hypothesis (1) that no prefunctional stage exists as far as the determiner system is concerned and (2) that the syntactic properties of determiners play an essential triggering role early on. The analysis of the determiner system in the aphasic child has a double interest. On the one hand, it may help to shed light on some of the intriguing questions concerning this type of disorder; on the other, it may be relevant for the discussion of the notion of agrammatism. Results of the morphosyntactic analysis reveal that, apart from timing differences, recovery from childhood aphasia shares important features with normal development. Differently from mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched normal controls and the aphasic child, SLI children omit determiners significantly more often than almost any other functional category or free morpheme. We will argue that the reasons for the SLI children’s atypical behavior have to be sought in the nonaccessibility to or in the misappreciation of one fundamental syntactic property of determiners: their role as elements that assign argumenthood to nominal expressions (Szabolcsi, 1987; Longobardi, 1994).
Keywords: Determiners, Acquisition, SLI, Aphasia
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Bottari, P., Cipriani, P., & Chilosi, A. M. (1993). Protosyntactic Devices in the Acquisition of Italian Free Morphology. Language Acquisition, 3(4), 327–369.
Abstract: This article concerns the production of schwa-like elements (Monosyllabic Place Holders, MPHs) before lexical items in early utterances of Italian children. These elements perform the function of protomorphemes, a role testified to by several facts, including the complementary distribution between them and free grammatical morphemes over time. These findings consistently support the idea that functional categories emerge very early and that virtually no “prefunctional” stage needs to be hypothesized for early combinatorial speech. The purpose of this article is twofold: (a) to show that MPHs do not stem from imitation but actually retain important grammatical properties of functional free morphemes, and (b) to show that in the development of free morphology certain syntactic (positional) properties, via the MPH strategy, emerge before full assessment of morphophonological paradigms take place. This implies that learning morphology cannot be conceived of solely as proceeding through a series of inferences about the distributional properties of the single morphological items.
Keywords: Acquisition, Production, Function words
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Crisma, P., & Tomasutti, E. (2000). Phonological Effects on Article Omission in the Acqisition of Italian. In S. Catherine Howell et al (Ed.), (pp. 220–231). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Keywords: Acquisition, Italian, Determiners
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