10.15160/1826-803X/88
L'acquisizione dei pronomi clitici, elemento centrale della ricerca in  ambito linguistico (Guasti [1993-1994], Schaeffer [2000], Wexler et al. [2004], Hamann et al. [1996], Jakubovicz et al. [1998] e molti altri), può essere studiata come un fenomeno  d'interfaccia: l'uso adulto di queste parole funzionali implica la  padronanza di diversi aspetti della conoscenza linguistica (Monachesi  [2007]). Studi recenti sull'Italiano indicano che i clitici sono fin da  subito posizionati in modo corretto (Guasti [1993-1994], Cipriani et al. [1993], Antelmi [1997], Schaeffer [2000]). Tuttavia, nei primi stadi  dello sviluppo linguistico, il numero dei clitici prodotti è basso, e il  loro uso è caratterizzato da omissioni opzionali. In questo articolo  vengono presentati i risultati di uno studio pilota mirato alla  produzione di clitici oggetto in bambini di età compresa tra i 3 e i 4  anni. I dati, riguardanti errori di accordo e omissioni, vengono  discussi dal punto di vista sintattico, semantico e pragmatico. Sulla  base di recenti studi sull'integrazione di sintassi e discorso nei primi  anni di vita (Schaeffer [2000], Serratrice [2004], Avrutin [2004]),  particolare attenzione viene posta sull'acquisizione del sistema  referenziale associato a nomi e  pronomi.
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Roberta Tedeschi
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<i>The acquisition of objects clitics in Italian: Data from an elicited production task</i>
Text.Serial.Journal
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Linguistica
2012-10-09
2012-01-12
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Roberta Tedeschi
2006
10.15160/1826-803X/88
31
1826-803X
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42
<i>The acquisition of objects clitics in Italian: Data from an elicited production task</i>
https://annali.unife.it/lettere/article/download/88/43
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere
Vol. 2 (2006) 31/42


                                                      ROBERTA TEDESCHI


                The acquisition of object clitics in Italian: Data from an elicited production task *


        1. Introduction

        The acquisition of clitics in Romance languages is a topic of central interest in current
linguistic research (see Guasti [1993-1994], Schaeffer [2000], Wexler et al. [2004], Hamann et al.
[1996], Jakubovicz et al. [1998] a. m. o.). As noticed by Monachesi (2006), the acquisition of clitics
can be viewed as an interface phenomenon: their adult-like use requires the mastering of different
aspects of linguistic knowledge.
        Studies on the acquisition of object clitics in Italian have shown that when children produce
clitics, no misplacement is found. However, in early stages the number of clitics uttered is low and
their use is delayed (Guasti [1993-1994]). Clitic omissions have been found in spontaneous speech
samples (Guasti [1993-1994], Cipriani et al. [1993], Antelmi [1997]) and in a mixed judgement-
elicited production task (Schaeffer [2000]).
        Examples of clitic omissions in early Italian (from the Calambrone corpus, Cipriani et al.
[1989], contained in the CHILDES database, Mac Whinney and Snow [1985]) are given in (1) – (3)
below. In the examples, “0w” indicates that a pre-verbal (direct) object clitic has been omitted.


        (1)        vie'              0w accarezzi .
                   come pro -- pet
                   ‘come, (you) pet --’
                   (Raffaello, 2;6)


        (2)        poi               0w metto qua
                    then pro          -- put   here
                  ‘then (I) put -- here’ (while playing with a toy turtle and a toy frog)
                  (Diana, 1;11)


        (3)       penché penché 0w ha usuato lui .
                  because because -- has used he

*
  I would like to thank Marina Nespor, Paola Monachesi, Laura Bafile, Martin Everaert, Sergey Avrutin, Anca
Sevcenco, Jakub Dotlacil, Nino Grillo and Paolo Lorusso for their comments and suggestions at various stages of this
study. Moreover, I would like to thank the children who took part in the test and the teachers of the day-care centre A.
Giordani in Cento, Italy.
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                            R. Tedeschi
Vol. 2 (2006) 32/42


                  ‘because he has used --’
                  (Raffaello, 2;6.13)


        Interestingly, omissions are characterized by optionality. This phenomenon, which can be
extended to other functional categories as well, has been addressed in more than one study. Besides
accounts focussing on clitics’ structural properties only (Wexler et al. [2004]), there are approaches
which put the development of children’s referential system in the foreground: Guasti (1993-1994)
suggests that the optionality stage reflects an incomplete mastery of the referential system
associated with nouns and pronouns.
        Referentiality is a key word in Schaeffer (2000) as well. The fact that children sometimes
correctly produce a clitic, and sometime omit it, induced Schaeffer to adopt the “Full Clause
Hypothesis”, claiming that functional categories are present from the beginning in child grammar.
According to the author, children optionally omit clitics because they lack a pragmatic principle, the
Concept of Non-Shared knowledge (speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent).
Children would sometimes fail to distinguish between discourse related and non-discourse related
referentiality, with the result that they would optionally mark referentiality through a syntactic
mechanism (in our case, clitic placement), or through a non-linguistic mechanism (as if the referent
was part of the long-term shared knowledge between speaker and hearer). Omissions would thus
result from the marking of referentiality through a non-linguistic mechanism.
        In Tedeschi (to appear) the high accessibility status (Ariel [1990]) of clitics in discourse is
underlined, and it is suggested that optional omission is not caused by pragmatic factors, but by a
competition between discourse and syntactic requirements, due to economy constraints which
would affect children’s performance. The same paper presented data from an elicited production
task. The experiment investigated clitic production in six preschool Italian children. The original
aim of the pilot-study was to test the influence of discourse factors on clitic omission. In particular,
the prominence of the clitic’s antecedent was manipulated and a correlation between prominence of
the antecedent and number of omissions was expected. However, no evidence was found for this
correlation. For this reason, the results were merged. The present paper gives a quantitative and
qualitative description of the findings. The data show that children’s production is characterized by
a relatively high number of agreement errors, some of which are particularly interesting with
respect to the acquisition of argument structure and referentiality.
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                             R. Tedeschi
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        2. Pilot-study: Elicited production

        In this paper, data from 6 Italian children aged 3;02.22 to 4;02.7 (mean age 3;6) are discussed.
The data come from a pilot-study run in Italy in March 2006. Children were tested at the day-care
centre “A. Giordani”, in Cento. In the pilot-study, sentences requiring obligatory use of direct object
clitics were elicited. The task consisted in the description of pictures in which one agent performed
an action on one or two (animate) patients. The following transitive verbs were used: baciare (to
kiss), guardare (to look), chiamare (to call), pettinare (to comb) and sgridare (to reproach). All
third person direct object clitics were elicited (masculine-singular, masculine-plural, feminine-
singular, feminine plural).
        The experimenter adopted the following procedure:
        Condition 1:
        A.          Identify the characters X, Y and (if present) Z. The experimenter can help the child
recognize them (e.g. «Do you know the characters in this picture? This is a monkey, right? And
this is a lion»).
        B.          Ask the child: «What is X doing to Y?” If the action is not clear, give suggestions
without using clitic pronouns (e.g. «What is the monkey doing to the lion? It seems to me that the
monkey is combing the lion, right? Tell the puppet! What is the monkey doing to the lion?»).
        Condition 2:
        A.          Identify the characters X, Y and (if present) Z. The experimenter can help the child
recognize them.
        B.          Focus the attention of the child on the character(s) Y (and Z), antecedent(s) of the
direct object clitic, by making comments about them. In this phase, the experimenter participates in
the description (e.g. «Look at this lion! It looks beautiful, doesn’t he? He is so big, so colourful. He
is smiling, right?»).
        C.          Ask the child: «What is X doing to Y?»


        In both conditions, the answer in normal adults involves obligatory use of a direct object,
preferably a clitic. For example, in the case of a picture where a monkey (feminine) is combing a
lion (masculine), the expected answer is lo pettina (pro cl-him combs).
        The material used in the experiment consisted of 20 items and 8 fillers. The order of the
pictures was randomised with the constraints that 1) two pictures of one condition and 2) two
pictures eliciting the same clitic should not occur in immediate succession.
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                                           R. Tedeschi
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        Non-parametric statistics (Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test) did not show any significant
difference between conditions (z= -0.447, p> 0.1). However, as observed in the introduction, the
study provided some unexpected findings which are worth discussing. For the purposes of this
paper, the results for Condition 1 and Condition 2 are merged together. For a more detailed
description of the experiment, its original aim and post-hoc considerations see Tedeschi (to appear).


        3. Quantitative analysis

        3.1 Omissions and substitutions

        This chapter reports the results of the pilot-study mentioned above. Table 1 shows the overall
proportion of clitics uttered, omitted and substituted. Children’s answers were coded as irrelevant
for the purposes of the study in 25.9% of cases. Irrelevant data are not reported in this paper.


                              Clitics                        Omissions                      Substitutions
                         65% (78/120)                      5.8% (7/120)                      3.3% (4/120)

                   Table 1 Overall percentages (and proportions) of clitics uttered, omitted and substituted


        The percentage of clitics uttered includes agreement errors (also “inversions”, as described in
3.2 below) and indirect object clitics, which were sometimes produced, especially with the verb ‘to
kiss’ (to give a kiss). The percentage of omissions includes omitted direct and indirect object clitics.
For substitutions are intended utterances characterized by use of the character’s name or by use of a
demonstrative pronoun. Reflexive clitics were not included.
        Table 2 shows the individual results:


                                                           Clitics               Omissions              Substitutions
                  Alessandro (3;6.21)                 45% (9/20)                0% (0/20)               10% (2/20)
                  Alice (3;2.22)                      30% (6/20)                20% (4/20)              5% (1/20)
                  Edoardo (3;4.26)                    90% (18/20)               0% (0/20)               5% (1/20)
                  Elena (4;0.7)                       65% (13/20)               0% (0/20)               0% (0/20)
                  Joanna (4;2.7)                      70% (14/20)               15% (3/20)              0% (0/20)
                  Sara (3;5.3)                        90% (18/20)               0% (0/20)               0% (0/20)

                                 Table 2 Individual results: Clitics uttered, omitted and substituted
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                                              R. Tedeschi
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        The proportion of clitics uttered varied from child to child. Alice, the youngest child,
produced the lowest number of clitics and her results show the highest percentage of omissions.
Alessandro also produced a limited number of clitics but in his case 6 items out of 20 where lost
because of his lack of attention during the task. By recalculating the proportion on the basis of the
items which received an answer, the percentage of clitics uttered would reach 64%.
        In line with the findings reported by Schaeffer (2000), children sometimes produced full DPs
instead of clitic pronouns. However, the percentage of full direct objects is much lower here than in
Schaeffer’s results (3.3% vs. 23%).

        3.2 Agreement errors and “inversions”

        A first analysis of the data reveals that children made agreement errors in 33.3 % of cases
(26/78). Agreement errors have been attested in previous studies. However, the design of the
experiment allowed a deeper investigation of this phenomenon 1 . It has been mentioned above that
all direct object clitics were elicited. Moreover, Agent and Patient always differed in gender. The
characteristics of the material allowed the detection of a second type of error: the inversion of
Agent/Subject and Patient/Object in children’s answers. More than a half of the previously coded as
“agreement” errors were thus reconsidered as “inversions”.
        Inversions where only counted on the basis of direct object clitics. In fact, in the variety of
Italian spoken in Cento and in the surrounding areas, the indirect object clitic gli ‘to him’
(masculine, singular) in colloquial language often substitutes the more formal clitic le ‘to her’ to
indicate a feminine referent. Moreover, the clitic gli often substitutes the plural weak pronoun loro
‘to them’, for both masculine and feminine 2 .


                              Agreement errors                                       Inversions
                                     15.4% (12/78)                                 17.9% (14/78)
                               Table 3 Proportion of errors with respect to the clitics uttered.


        Table 4 shows the proportion of agreement errors and inversions in relation to the clitics
uttered by each child.


1
  In the pictures, the same character appeared sometimes as agent of the action, and sometimes as patient. This
particular characteristic of the material used might have influenced the phenomenon of inversion, increasing it.
2
  The dative clitic gli /i/ was sometimes substituted by the form li /li/, easier to articulate. Li is an accusative clitic
(masculine, plural). It is possible that children sometimes wrongly produced /li/ as a direct object clitic with verbs
requiring an indirect object. However, /li/ was coded as dative (corresponding to gli) in the presence of ditransitive
verbs. /li/ was coded as the direct object clitic li in all other cases. As a consequence, case errors might have been
underestimated.
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                                          R. Tedeschi
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                                                      Agreement errors                     Inversions
                    Alessandro (3;6.21)                    0% (0/9)                       22.2% (2/9)
                    Alice (3;2.22)                         0% (0/6)                            0% (0/6)
                    Edoardo (3;4.26)                     11.1% (2/18)                    27.7% (5/18)
                    Elena (4;0.7)                        38.5% (5/13)                    15.4% (2/13)
                    Joanna (4;2.7)                       14.3% (2/14)                    28.6% (4/14)
                    Sara (3;5.3)                         16.7% (3/18)                     5.5% (1/18)

                       Table 4 Agreement errors and inversions of agent and patient (individual results).
                                     Proportions are based on the number of clitics uttered.


        The following sections present a qualitative analysis of the results, including examples of
errors and omissions. The findings will be further discussed in chapter 5.


        4. Qualitative analysis

        4.1 Omissions are optional

        Despite the low number of omissions, the few cases attested confirm that the phenomenon of
omission is optional. Joanna, aged 4;02.7, made productive use of clitics during the test. However,
the examples in (4) and (5) below show that with the verb chiamare (‘to call’), the child sometimes
produced, and sometimes omitted a direct object clitic.


        (4) Question: What is the dog doing to the sheeps?
             Answer: chiama (pro calls --)


        (5) Question: What is the dog doing to the sheep?
             Answer: la chiama (pro cl-her calls)


        Given the low rates of omissions, a deeper investigation of the contexts in which this
phenomenon emerges was impossible. I plan to carry out a new test on a younger population (age 2
to 3) in the future, in order to investigate possible factors affecting omission.


        4.2 Different types of errors

        As mentioned in section 3.2, children made agreement errors and other errors which were
classified as “inversions”. With exception of the youngest child, who gave a low number of target-
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                                     R. Tedeschi
Vol. 2 (2006) 37/42


like answers, all children made agreement errors or inversions. Here I would like to present a
description of the second type of error. Five children out of six made errors similar to the one
presented in (6) below. Agent and Patient seem to be inverted. The child uses a clitic form which
agrees with the subject, and not with the object. In the picture presented to the child whose answer
is reported in (6), a lion is combing a monkey. In Italian, the grammatical gender of lion is
masculine (m), and the grammatical gender of monkey is feminine (f) 3 . The child was asked what
the lion was doing to the monkey. The answer is given below:


         (6)        lo       trucca
               pro cl-him makes up
               ‘(she) puts make up on him’
               (Alessandro, 3;6.21)


         On the basis of this example only, it would still be possible to claim that the child did not
know the gender of the characters, and that we are dealing with agreement errors originating from a
limited knowledge in this respect. However, when children used a full DP to refer to the characters,
they always chose the correct gender. Moreover, these errors were also found with plural objects,
and in such cases the verb appeared in third person plural. The fact that in the data clitics sometimes
agreed with the subject (instead of agreeing with the object), while the verb agreed with the object
(instead of agreeing with the subject), appears to indicate that children could not always link the
clitic to its antecedent, or that they inverted Agent and Patient in their answers.
         The example in (7) below is uttered in response to the question «what is the dog (m) doing to
the sheeps (f)?» The child’s answer suggests that relating a clitic to its antecedent and/or assigning
thematic roles is sometimes problematic. This fact is made clear by various self-corrections by the
child.


         (7)       lo        vanno a plendele...       la     va…         la       vanno a plendele
               pro cl-him go          to pick up…pro cl-her goes pro cl-her go            to pick up
            ‘(they) go to pick him up, (he) goes her, (they) go to pick her up’
            (Edoardo, 3;4.26)


         In the first sentence uttered in (7), «they go to pick him up», the child uses a clitic form which
agrees in gender and number with the subject (masculine, singular), and not with the object

3
    From now on, gender will be indicated with (f) for feminine and with (m) for masculine.
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                              R. Tedeschi
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(feminine, plural), while the verb agrees with the object (plural), and not with the subject (singular).
In the first self-correction, the child utters a clitic form which agrees in gender (but not in number)
with the object, while the verb correctly agrees with the subject (singular). In the second self-
correction, the clitic still agrees with the object in gender (but not in number), and the verb once
again agrees with the object, and not with the subject.
        A similar example of inversion is given in (8) below. In this case, the picture described a
penguin (m) looking at two seals (f), and the child was asked to tell what the penguin was doing to
the seals.


        (8)         lo         lo    lo      le         guaddano
              pro cl- him cl-him cl-him cl-her look
           ‘(they) look at him him him her’
           (Alessandro, 3;6.21)


        In (8), the child first selects the wrong antecedent for the clitic (masculine, singular), then he
corrects himself and selects the required form (feminine, plural). However, the verb still agrees with
the object (plural).
        The results of a study on adult subjects investigating attraction effects occurring in a c-
commanding condition of intervention show that, in French, the presence of an object clitic in
preverbal position triggers interference effects of attraction in subject-verb agreement (Franck et al.
[2006]). The authors observe the occurrence of agreement errors when an object clitic intervenes
between the subject and the inflected verb, as in (9) below:


        (9) le professeur les             lit/*lisent
              the professor cl-them reads/*read
              ‘the professor reads/*read them’


        A similar effect of attraction might partially account for the errors found when subject and
object differed in number. In (7) and (8) above the verb wrongly agrees in number with the object
instead of agreeing with the subject.
        The examples in (6) – (8) suggest different hypotheses, reflecting the fact that clitics allow
investigations from several viewpoints. Inversions could be the result of a difficulty in establishing
semantic, discourse or syntactic relations. These are just sketched hypotheses. In order to define the
relevance and the nature of the findings presented in this section, further investigations are needed.
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                              R. Tedeschi
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        4.3 Subjects and objects in comprehension

        A phenomenon similar to “inversion” between subject and object has been observed in more
than one study on preschool children. Hendriks et al. (2006) report and discuss data from a study by
Chapman and Miller (1975) on 15 English preschool children, tested in both production and
comprehension. In production, after watching an action performed by an experimenter with two
dolls, children (age 1;8 – 2;8) were asked to tell the experimenter what had happened. They
answered correctly in 83.7% of cases with two animate actors. In comprehension, the same children
performed correctly in only 66.5% of cases. They often demonstrated the action expressed by the
sentence «the boy is hitting the girl» with the girl doll hitting the boy doll. The results were partially
replicated by McClellan et al. (1986). Hendriks et al. propose an Optimality Theory account for
these findings, and they relate poor performance in comprehension to the wrong ranking of two
constraints, PRECEDENCE and PROMINENCE. For English children, PROMINENCE (animacy,
but also discourse prominence) would erroneously be ranked higher than PRECEDENCE (word
order). Although it is not the aim of this paper to define what kind of cues are used by Italian
children in clitic comprehension, the fact that children’s production presents a certain number of
errors suggests that an even higher percentage could be found in comprehension. The investigation
of the effects of word order and prominence in comprehension might reveal which of the
hypotheses formulated in 4.2 for production better correlates with comprehension results.


        5. Conclusion

        As shown in table 1 and 2, in section 3.1 above, the results of the pilot-study present a low
number of omissions. This fact largely depends on the age of the tested population. Similarly to
Schaeffer (2000), the data show that the tested subjects, aged 3 to 4, performed almost adult-like in
this respect. However, our results present an even lower number of omissions (5.7% vs. 15%) While
the test discussed in this paper elicited object clitics through a specific question, Schaffer’s test was
a mix between elicited production and a judgement task. The different methodology used in the
pilot-study and in Schaeffer’s experiment could be the reason of the discrepancy in the results.
        Despite their low number, omissions are clearly optional. As shown in the examples (4) and
(5) in section 4.1, the same child produced or omitted a clitic in the same session, even when the
action performed (the verb) was the same. This finding indicates that omissions are not the
consequence of a lack of competence with respect to the verbal valence of the verbs used to elicit
clitics in the experiment. The acquisition of argument structure could rather be addressed in order to
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                            R. Tedeschi
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account for the errors discussed in section 4.2. In fact, the examples in (6) – (8) reflect an agent –
patient mismatch between the visual material presented and children’s answers. A second factor
which could have affected children’s performance is the task of relating a clitic to its antecedent.
Although children used clitic pronouns to refer to (prominent) antecedents, thus establishing a clitic
– antecedent relation, they sometimes failed to choose the correct antecedent. In this view, the fact
that both characters were animate topics, salient in discourse, might have originated a competition
between candidate antecedents, resulting sometimes in the production of a wrong clitic form.
Intervention factors were also addressed, following a syntactic analysis of attraction.
        The acquisition of clitics is affected by several linguistic factors and involves interaction of
different aspects of linguistic knowledge. Clitics can be viewed as structurally, phonologically and
referentially deficient pronouns (Cardinaletti – Starke [1999; 2000]), whose properties are acquired
in early stages of development. The acquisition of clitics can be associated with the acquisition of
argument structure, as in the lexical approach proposed in Monachesi (2006). Omissions suggest
that children sometimes encode information through a linguistic, and sometimes through a non-
linguistic mechanism/channel (Schaeffer [2000]; Avrutin [2004; 2006]; Serratrice et al. [2004]),
revealing competition at the syntax – discourse interface. Moreover, children rely on lower-than-
normal processing capacities, an increasingly addressed factor in language acquisition research. The
study of clitics can focus on how different aspects of linguistic knowledge are acquired, on how
syntactic and pragmatic competences are integrated, and on how economy constraints can affect
children’s performance. Further investigations, both in production and in comprehension, seem
promising in all respects.


Roberta Tedeschi
Università di Utrecht
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
Janskerkhof, 13
NL – 3512 BL Utrecht
roberta.tedeschi@let.uu.nl
Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                          R. Tedeschi
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Annali Online di Ferrara - Lettere                                                         R. Tedeschi
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