Acceso usuarios
[1]
;
Silleresi, Silvia
[1]
;
Guasti, Maria Teresa
[1]
;
Artemis Alexiadou
[2]
;
Uli Sauerland
[3]
Milán, Italia
Berlin, Stadt, Alemania
This paper investigates the different uses of the clitic si in Child Italian. Through a corpus study on spontaneous productions of children aged 1;4-3;4, we check whether all functions of si are realized by children and we give a new perspective from language acquisition to a long-standing debate, namely whether there exists only one type of si or whether there are many different ones. Our results show that Italian children use si productively and adult-like early on, and they produce all its different functions: impersonal, anticausative, true reflexive, and inherent reflexive – although at different rates. We claim that our results support the one si approaches, and the difference in the frequencies of si functions reflects the structural complexity of some structures.
