What Early Clitics Can Tell Us about Early Subjects

Abstract

"It is a well-known fact that children drop subjects during the early stages of linguistic development, irrespective of the value of the subject drop parameter in the target language. It has also been argued that children acquiring null subject languages (NSL) drop the subject in an adult-like fashion at a very early stage, during which children acquiring a non-null subject language (NNSL) may still occasionally allow non-adult-like dropped subjects (Rizzi 1998). Few studies, however, focused on the status of early null subjects in NSLs or on the link between early subjects and other facets of the pro-drop parameter, such as the availability of overt postverbal subjects, of clitic doubling constructions, or of a morphologically rich agreement system"