LingLunch: Tommaso Sgrizzi (IUSS, Pavia)

Tommaso Sgrizzi (IUSS, Pavia) : At the roots of the Growing Tree: a preliminary look at the early production of root past participial structures in Italian

A well-established generalization in the acquisition literature holds that Italian-acquiring children, unlike their counterparts in English, French, or German, virtually never produce root infinitives (Guasti 1993, a.o.). Instead, a distinct and underexplored phenomenon emerges in their earliest speech: bare past participials, produced without an auxiliary, in root contexts. This talk presents a preliminary look at children's corpus data (CHILDES) guided by the participial taxonomy offered in Cecchetto & Donati (2023), who argue that bare participials are genuinely reduced structures projecting at most a VP, with no T head. Under their proposal, when the internal argument of an unaccusative or passive verb moves past the participle, feature-sharing labels the structure as a ΦP, resulting in a configuration that possesses full illocutionary force despite its reduced size. This connects naturally to the Growing Trees hypothesis (Friedmann et al. 2021), under which early grammars project only the lower portion of the clausal spine: bare participials, on this view, are not impoverished attempts at a full clause, but the genuine clausal output of an early grammar whose tree has not yet grown past the VP. The most directly relevant prior work is Salustri et al. (2004), who document cross-linguistic asymmetries in auxiliary omission and link children's productions to properties of the adult input. While this input-oriented direction is valuable, their approach collapses the structural distinctions central to Cecchetto & Donati's taxonomy, and their measure of input evidence is narrow (in the sense of Legate & Yang 2007). A more principled assessment could be achieved through Yang's (2002) variational learning framework. This talk outlines these theoretical connections and the empirical predictions they generate.

References: 

Cecchetto, C., & Donati, C. (2023). Labeling (reduced) structures: when VPs are sentences. Linguistic Inquiry, 55(1), 1-37.  * Friedmann, N., Belletti, A., & Rizzi, L. (2021). Growing trees: The acquisition of the left periphery. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6(1). * Guasti, M. T. (1993). Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: Finite and nonfinite verbs. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 3(1), 1–40 * Legate, J. A., & Yang, C. (2007). Morphosyntactic learning and the development of tense. Language acquisition, 14(3), 315-344. * Salustri, M., Berger-Morales, J., & Sy, M. (2004). Participial constructions in child grammar: Correlations with verb movement properties. LOT Occasional Series, 3, 409-420. * Yang, C. D. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. OUP Oxford.