Null and Overt Subjects at the Syntax-Discourse Interface : Evidence from monolingual and bilingual acquisition

Abstract

"In this paper I will investigate the extent to which children understand and produce lexical noun phrases (NPs) and null and overt pronouns in appropriate discourse contexts in two languages like English and Italian which behave similarly in the distribution of lexical NPs, but differ in terms of the availability of null and overt pronominal forms. I will present evidence from comprehension and production, and I will draw upon both corpus and experimental data to illustrate the role played by different discourse cues. I will also use data from English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children to explore the robustness of discourse-pragmatic competence in situations of language contact"