1st Edition

Structures, Syntactic Computations and Acquisition

By Adriana Belletti Copyright 2023
    306 Pages 68 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti published over the last ten years or so, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies on (modes of) language acquisition through her work.

    The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part I presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the domain of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part II offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development.

    Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpreting the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics.

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction

    1. Relatives and passive object relatives in Italian-speaking children and adults: Intervention in production and comprehension
    2. On the acquisition of complex derivations with related considerations on poverty of the stimulus and frequency
    3. Topics and passives in Italian-speaking children and adults  
    4. Internal grammar and children's grammatical creativity against poor inputs
    5. Contributing to linguistic theory, language description, and the characterization of language development through experimental studies
    6. Revisiting the cartography of (Italian) postverbal subjects from different angles with reference to canonicality
    7. Labeling (Romance) causatives
    8. (Reflexive) Si as a route to passive in Italian
    9. On Fin: Italian che, Japanese no, and the selective properties of the copula in clefts
    10. The focus map of clefts: Extraposition and predication
    11. Revisiting the CP of clefts
    12. On a-marking of object topics in the Italian left periphery
    13. Objects and subjects in the left periphery: The case of a-topics

    Index

    Biography

    Adriana Belletti is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Siena, Italy. Over the years her main research has focused on generative comparative morphosyntax and on different modes of language acquisition and forms of language pathologies. Her previous publications include Structures and Strategies (2009).