Relative clause formation in Romance childs production

Abstract

This article presents two elicited production experiments with Italian and French children, focusing on the absence of prepositional pied-piping relatives and the use of resumptive relatives. Contrary to Labelle (1990), (1996), we argue that the absence of pied-piping relatives does not prove that children fail to form relatives through wh-movement. The account of this avoidance in terms of Kayne's analysis (1995) and of derivational complexity, as in McDaniel, McKee and Bernstein (1998), raises theoretical problems. Based on the observation that in Romance, (i) pied-piping relatives are the only relatives that contain relative pronouns and (ii) pied-piping relatives are typical of the more formal variety of the language, our claim is that children learn relative pronouns and thus pied-piping relatives only during school years, through explicit teaching. Copyright © 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG.