The distribution of clitics in L1 Italian: A person split approach

Clitics are pronominal elements that agree in gender and number with a neighboring Noun Phrase (NP). Clitics bear direct or oblique case (accusative and dative respectively) in Italian. In the Italian clitic system, a person split is found: 3rd person clitics, which represent event- anchored (Manzini & Savoia, 2011) participants, have specialized forms (lo/la) for accusatives and (gli/le) for the dative, while 1st and 2nd person clitics, which represent discourse-anchored participants, display syncretic accusative/dative forms (mi/ti for both cases). We expect that 1st and 2nd person clitics are easier to acquire than 3rd person ones because they do not display any dedicated case morphology. Our proposal is that person split morphology in the Italian clitic system will influence early productions as an effect of lexical parameterization (Manzini & Wexler 1987): the mapping between a particular lexical item and a cluster of morpho-syntactic properties.