ENJOY LINGUISTICS! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday Edited by Valentina Bianchi & Cristiano Chesi CISCL Press Valentina Bianchi & Cristano Chesi (eds.) ENJOY LINGUISTICS! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday CISCL PRESS via Roma 56 – 53100 SIENA, Italy www.ciscl.unisi.it ISBN 978-88-9079-430-8 This Celebration collects contributions by some former students of Luigi, and a few of the visiting scholars who have interacted with him at the CISCL center in Siena. Alas, we were not able to reach all the people who might be willing to contribute to this celebration. Therefore, the following list is just a representative subset of a much wider community! Introduction: Adriana Belletti About CISCL 5 Contributions: Flavia Adani Some notes on the acquisition of relative clauses: New data and open questions 6 Giulia Bianchi A cartographic approach to the second language acquisition of German weak pronouns 14 Valentina Bianchi & Cristiano Chesi Subject islands and the Subject Criterion 25 Carlo Cecchetto & Caterina Donati “Perché” Rizzi is right 54 Cristiano Chesi & Andrea Moro Computational blindness in the brain 63 Carla Contemori & Maria Garraffa Subject relatives in typical and atypical language development 67 Silvio Cruschina Focus in Existential Sentences 77 Lena Dal Pozzo New information subjects in bilingual and monolingual child production 108 Elisa Di Domenico Focus and focus positions: The case of Perugino 117 Michelangelo Falco Specificity: the syntax/semantics mapping. A research project 134 Maria Cristina Figueiredo Silva A note on the prosody of focalized structures in Brazilian Portuguese 141 Irene Franco Subject requirement, complementizers and optionality 150 Mara Frascarelli The interpretation of discourse categories: Cartography for a crash-proof syntax 180 Naama Friedmann & Aviah Gvion Intervention and Locality in agrammatic aphasia 192 Giuliana Giusti On Force and Case, Fin and Num 205 Günther Grewendorf & Cecilia Poletto Separable prefixes and verb positions in Cimbrian 218 Nino Grillo Local and universal 234 Simona Mancini On agreement feature processing and representation 246 Simona Matteini L2 parameter “shifting” in the DP domain: developmental patterns in the acquisition of German possessive constructions in a formal environment 261 Carlos Mioto Reduced Pseudoclefts in Caribbean Spanish and in Brazilian Portuguese 287 Vincenzo Moscati The cartography of Negative Markers: why negation breaks the assumption of LF/PF isomorphism 303 Emilio Servidio Polarity particles in Italian fragment answers 310 Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson Thoughts on cartography and universality 326 Marit Westergaard, Øystein Vangsnes, Terje Lohndal Norwegian som: The complementizer that climbed to the matrix Left Periphery and caused Verb Second violations 329 About CISCL ADRIANA BELLETTI University of Siena [email protected] The organizers have asked me to briefly describe the birth and some essential features of the history of CISCL. Here I am, with these few lines on the occasion of Luigi’s 60th birthday. CISCL was born toward the end of the year 1999. That was a time of special enthusiasm and lively activity for linguistics in Siena (where we had both arrived in the fall of 1996), which culminated with Chomsky’s visit to the University of Siena for the whole month of November, and with the two workshops in the same month organized at the Certosa of Pontignano, emanating from the conclusion of the first Cartographic Project, nationally coordinated by Luigi Rizzi. A clear need was felt at that point of creating a gravitational center, toward which the cognitive formal studies on language carried out in Siena could converge. In the imagined design, the center should function as a unifying pole for the research activity of doctoral and master students and young post-docs and, hopefully, it should attract long and short-term visitors from other national and international institutions. Indeed, this is what CISCL has become and has been over the years. Luigi’s constant presence and personal involvement as the center director, his determination in making CISCL not just an abstract entity, but rather a very concrete physical place where professors, students, visitors go on a regular basis, where ideas are developed and collaborations arise and new projects are put forth, has been crucial to the growth of CISCL and its acquired international dimension. CISCL has been, over the years, a real center for the activity of senior and young researchers together, without any attention to unproductive hierarchies; in this center researchers could all pursue their studies in generative linguistics in a very broad perspective, ranging from studies in formal syntax, semantics, phonology, discourse pragmatics, to philosophical studies in the domain of the philosophy of language and mind, to experimental studies in the domain of language acquisition and language pathology. The list of research-seminars given at CISCL over the years is quite significant if we consider the quality and international reputation of the guest speakers, as is the rich list of visitors. I think we all very much hope that CISCL will continue to be the pole of attraction it has been over the last decade and we all thank Luigi, for his fundamental impulse to the new adventure that CISCL has represented for linguistics in Siena and the enhancement in language related research it has generated. 2012 Adriana Belletti Enjoy Linguistics! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday Some notes on the Acquisition of Relative Clauses: New Data and Open Questions* FLAVIA ADANI Universität Potsdam, Department Linguistik [email protected] This paper presents new experimental evidence on the relevance of feature mismatch between the head noun and the embedded noun in the comprehension of relative clauses. Exp. 1 shows that number mismatch determines an amelioration of both subject- and object-extracted relatives in English children. Exp. 2 shows that animacy mismatch per se does not play a role in German but 4-year-olds show a frequency effect, which disappears in older children and adults. The implications of these findings for recent approaches to the acquisition of relative clauses are discussed. For Luigi, I am still grateful for your inspiring introductory course to linguistics in 1999 - my first opportunity to jump into the realm of language acquisition- and for your guidance and advice ever since. 1. Introduction The correct understanding/processing of relative clauses (henceforth RC) requires the computation of grammatical relations between constituents that are pronounced in a position different from the one where they are interpreted. This is shown in (1) and (2): (1) The man that is scratching the boy … (2) The man that the boy is scratching … For instance, the DP the man is always pronounced at the beginning of the sentence in (1) and (2), but it is interpreted as the subject of the verb scratch in (1) and as its object in (2). Specifically, (1) is an example of a subject-extracted RC (henceforth SRC) and (2) is an object-extracted RC (henceforth ORC). Within the generative framework (Chomsky, 2000; Rizzi, 2004) and within linguistically-oriented psycholinguistic approaches (Carminati, 2005; Franck, Lassi, Fraunfelder & Rizzi, 2006, a.o.), the necessity to satisfy feature checking * I thank all the children who took part in the studies presented in this paper, their parents and their teachers; colleagues and students who helped me in conducting them: Maria Teresa Guasti, Matteo Forgiarini, Heather van der Lely for the experiment in English; Talea Glaw for the one in German and Jule Bergt for drawing the pictures. I am also grateful to Marinella Carminati for discussing these data in several occasions. All remaining errors are, of course, my own. 2012 Flavia Adani Enjoy Linguistics! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday Internet celebration for Luigi Rizzi’s 60th birthday CISCL, Siena requirements is the trigger of a movement operation, by means of which the original merging position (where the constituent is interpreted) and the final landing position (where the constituent is pronounced) are connected. Over the years, several accounts have been proposed of how children fine-tune their abilities to compute these complex dependencies. Although diverging in several respects, the earlier hypotheses (see Guasti, 2002 for a summary) shared the common idea that, up to 5 years of age, children are unable to use adult-like linguistic processes, and they have resort to a number of linear heuristics to process RCs. Since then, a lot of experimental work has been conducted and a number of theoretical approaches have been proposed to capture old and new data. In what follows, I will provide a summary of two of these recent approaches, namely the frequency/usage- based approach and the grammatical/intervention approach (section 2). Then, I will focus on some recent data which, in my opinion, raise some new questions for both approaches. In particular, I will discuss the following results: a) The comprehension of center-embedded RCs is enhanced in English-speaking children when number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs are manipulated. This means that children display a more accurate performance when one of the nominal constituents is singular and the other one is plural (e.g. The hippo that the rhinos are washing has climbed onto the stool), rather than when these constituents have the same number (both singular or both plural, e.g. The hippo that the rhino is washing has climbed onto the stool). This facilitation effect is attested in both SRC and ORC and it is of comparable amplitude in the two structures (section 3). b) When tested in comprehension, German-speaking 4-year-olds are significantly more accurate on ORC with inanimate heads (e.g. The pullover that the man is scratching) than on ORC with animate heads (e.g. The boy that the man is scratching).