Why Children Omit Clitics in Some Languages but not in Others: New Evidence from Greek

Abstract

"In this paper we investigate developmental properties of direct object clitics across languages, in particular the status of clitic omission in child Greek. Our focus is whether clitic omission is a universal stage that all children speaking a clitic language go through or this holds only for some languages. If the later is the case (as clearly stated in the title) then the question is how we can account for these differences among clitic languages. The theory we are developing here is a further attempt to unify universal properties of development across constructions, including object positions as well as subject positions (see Wexler, to appear). In particular, by unifying the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage with the Clitic Omission Stage (ClO), we are able to explain the apparent variation in the development of pronominal clitics across languages by showing that this variation can be accounted for, if we adopt the same assumptions that are needed in order to explain the facts of the Optional Infinitive stage; that is, the interaction of a universal developmental constraint (the Unique Checking Constraint) with the particular syntactic properties of types of languages"