| This study investigates the acquisition of Italian direct and indirect object pronouns by English speaking adults. Contrary to previous L2A research, this investigation analyzes the acquisition of placement as well as that of case since Italian pronominal system is morphologically and semantically distinct. We predict that these pronouns will develop gradually and reach full maturation late, because English, being a cliticless language, is assumed to either lack the functional categories hosting these pronouns, or these projections have not been instantiated in the syntax. We also anticipate that these two sets of pronouns will follow distinct developmental patterns, and will reach full maturation in different acquisition stages. We will argue that this discrepancy is due to linguistic (distinct morpho-syntactic, semantic structure) as well as extra-linguistic factors (different coding). We also hypothesize that English grammar will play a crucial role in the acquisition of clitics given that English and Italian pronominal systems do not share any syntactic and semantic properties.; The result of our study show that (1) clitic placement and case-marking is not mastered in early stages, but later on; (2) Accusative case develops less uniformly than dative case, and reach full maturation much later on; (3) English grammar does influence the acquisition of these pronouns. Such effects, however, are more visible in the acquisition of their case-marking than in their placement.; We argue that these results support the Continuity Hypothesis : the functional projections hosting these pronouns are available from the beginning, even though they are not present in L1. The difficulties reported in the acquisition of case are not due to impairment in the underlying representation of the functional categories, but rather they reflect a problem in mapping the morphological form to syntactic features (Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis). Furthermore, the development of case-morphology is independent from the development of the syntactic representation of function categories, projections or features. Distinct linguistic components may reconfigure at different acquisition stages (Modularity Hypothesis). English grammar effects, mostly reported in the acquisition of case, indicate that L1 does not entirely constitute the initial stage in L2A (contra Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis). We conclude that the properties and features of Italian cliticization are accessible through UG and/or via L1 (Full Access/Partial Transfer Hypothesis). |
