English Compounds in Child Italian

Jacopo Torregrossa and Chiara Melloni1

Introduction At around the age of two, children start combining two words in a single utterance, which represents a universal stage of language acquisition. The present contribution focuses on combinations made out of two nouns (NNCs, henceforth). It has often been observed that these combinations show up consistently in the early production of children and this seems to hold true cross-linguistically, as is shown by the examples (1)-(5), extracted from the production of children speaking languages that are really different from a typological point of view2.

(1) mama dress (English) (2) kom baba ‘chair father’ (Luo) (3) täti auto ‘aunt car’ (Finnish) (4) zia trattore ‘aunt tractor’ (Italian) (5) Yael sefer ‘Yael book’ (Hebrew)

Early NNCs are used to express a number of basic, universal semantic

relations. For example, the utterances (1)-(5) all encode a possessor-possessee relation. The relation of location too has been widely attested in the literature (see, e.g., (6), taken from Bowerman 1973: Appendix R). Apart from these basic functions, the list is open to all the relations that may hold between an animate being and an inanimate object over which the former performs an action. Which semantic relation is actually involved is determined on the basis of contextual cues. For example, (7) expresses that Marco is playing with the ball.

(6) Kendall water (English) (7) Marco pallina ‘Marco ball’ (Italian)

In the remainder of the paper, we will not consider the latter group of relations,

mainly due to their high variability and to the fact that they arguably contain an unexpressed verb. Although superficially limited to the combinations of two nouns, (7) approaches a sentence with full thematic and predicative structure. Therefore, while event-denoting utterances will not be taken into account, the present analysis

will specifically target entity-denoting NNCs. As a result, our investigation will be restricted to the acquisition of the syntax of the nominal domain.

Our main purpose is to understand which criteria drive the combination of the two nouns and determine their relative order within the utterance. The literature suggests two main ways to deal with these issues, to which we will refer as the ‘cognitive-pragmatic approach’ and the ‘syntactic approach’ respectively3.

According to the former, each of the two nouns is identified as an independent informational unit. In other words, early NNCs are considered as instantiating a topic/comment schema. Within this framework, the analyses differ as to which definitions of topic and comment are assumed. Both Bates (1976) and Clark (2009) define ‘comment’ and ‘topic’ in terms of new and old information respectively. Moreover, the interaction between the two informational notions is taken to determine either the word order or the phonological structure of early NNCs. Bates argues that the comment unit always precedes the topic, as happens in (8). On the contrary, Clark reports several deviations from this rigid order (e.g., (9)) while showing that the comment unit always bears the main stress within the utterance.

(8) Mother: What’s in the street? David: Firetruck street.

(9) Mother (pointing to letter ‘A’ on truck in the picture): What’s that on the side of the milktruck?

David: miltruck B. (taken from Clark 2009: 165)

Bambini and Torregrossa (2010) identify topic and comment on the basis of their linguistic function, i.e., referring and characterizing respectively. Each of these functions is encoded by a cluster of basic cognitive and linguistic factors. For example, topic units tend to be expressed by nouns which denote agents or entities exhibiting high degree of contextual accessibility and concreteness. The authors argue that topic/comment configurations play a significant role in expressing pre-grammatical forms of predication and in bootstrapping subject-predicate structures.

Therefore, all these theories share the view that there is no evidence for syntax at this stage of language acquisition. The existence of regular patterns in NNCs is explained in terms of constraints active within the semantic-pragmatic component (e.g., comment comes first) or at the interface of pragmatics with phonology (e.g., stress on comment). Accordingly, the two-word stage of language acquisition has been considered as an example of ‘protolanguage’ (see Bickerton 1990 as a main reference on this issue).

On the contrary, the syntactic approach is grounded on the idea that early NNCs are built in compliance with syntactic criteria. This hypothesis has been pursued in line with the observation of a one-to-one correspondence between the expression of a certain semantic relation and the use of a certain word-order configuration. Since Brown (1973), it has often been noticed that, when expressing

possession, English children tend to utter the possessor first, as in (1) above. Interestingly, this reflects the word order found in the inflectional genitive structures of the input language. Therefore, this class of data has been taken as evidence that children have already acquired how to encode possession in the noun phrase, apart from the use of the possessive morpheme ʼs. This line of analysis, however, runs into two problems, one of theoretical and one of empirical nature. On the one hand, the observation of a certain word order may influence the labeling of the semantic relation. This is elegantly explained by Howe (1976: 41-42):

“When Gia said Truck wheel as she turned the wheels on the underside of a toy car, the decision to regard the utterance as possessive, synonymous with The truck has a wheel, was contingent, as Bloom (1970, our comment) pointed out, on the word order. She wrote that if the word order had been Wheel truck, she would have regarded the utterance as locative, synonymous with The wheel is on the truck.”

On the other hand, the theory cannot be applied cross-linguistically. The data in

(4) and (5) show that NNCs instantiating the word order possessor-possessee appear also in the early production of Italian and Hebrew children, even if this pattern is not attested in the input languages. In adult Italian and Hebrew, possessive relations are encoded by a prepositional phrase in which the possessee precedes the possessor (as in the Italian phrase trattore della zia ‘tractor of the aunt’ and in the Hebrew phrase sefer shel Yael ‘book of Yael’, corresponding to (4) and (5) respectively). Thus, examples (4) and (5) are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the syntactic structure of NNCs mirrors the input data.

Despite these difficulties, we aim to show that NNCs are driven by syntactic criteria and the relative order of the two nouns is determined by narrow syntax principles. However, we will adopt two major devices to avoid the abovementioned problems. Firstly, we will assume that children’s interpretation of semantic relations does not necessarily correspond to the adult standard. The labeling process will rely on the distinction between the relations of possession, location and classification, since it cannot be excluded a priori that some of them could play a pivotal role in driving NNC. Our analysis, however, leaves open the possibility that at this stage of language acquisition children do not discriminate between location and possession, in line with the idea that possessive relations derive ontogenetically and diachronically from locational ones. As Armon-Lotem at al. (2004: 176) observe, ‘the possession relation is considered as locational in nature mainly due to the cross-linguistic fact that possessive constructions derive (synchronically and diachronically) from locatives’ (see also den Dikken 1995 and Kayne 1993 on this issue). More in general, the child’s notion of possession may allow for a broader range of interpretations than the adult’s one, being more dependent on pragmatic and contextual factors (see Armon-Lotem et al. 2004 for

some similar considerations). If this line of reasoning is on the right track, we expect to observe a many-to-many relation between the use of a certain syntactic schema and the expression of a certain interpretation. For example, truck wheel could encode a number of different semantic interpretations depending on the context of utterance. Furthermore, the same range of interpretations could be associated with the opposite word order, i.e., wheel truck.

As a second methodological device, the children’s production of structures which are unrelated to the input language will not be taken as evidence for the lack of grammar. Instead, we will provide empirical and theoretical arguments that utterances like zia trattore ‘aunt tractor’ are endowed with syntactic structure. Along this line of reasoning, Armon-Lotem (1998) proposes to analyze the Hebrew structure in (5) as a specifier-head configuration in which the possessor sits in the specifier and receives inherent genitive case, as represented in (10), taken from Armon-Lotem (1998: 28). Crucially, this type of nominal structures never occurs in the adult language.

(10) [NP [NP Yael] [N’[N sefer]]]

In what follows, we will provide a different account of the data, but we will follow Armon-Lotem in restricting our analysis to only one syntactic domain, i.e., the nominal domain. As mentioned above, we will only consider entity-denoting NNCs. Including event-denoting NNCs would have required us to deal with many complicating factors (such as the acquisition of the sentential word order) which would have been difficult to manage at the same time in the scope of a single investigation.

On conclusion, the present investigation is built upon the hypothesis that the combination of two nouns in early productions is driven by syntactic criteria. The analysis in Section 1 will be set up to understand if NNCs exhibit specific syntactic, semantic and phonological features which could provide cues to their underlying syntactic structure. Section 2 and Section 3 will be devoted to the illustration and to the interpretation of the results, respectively. In particular, it will be shown that the two phonological, interpretive and word order patterns exhibited by NNCs derive from two different syntactic representations.

1. Methods

1.1. The data The study is based on the spoken production of 16 Italian children ranging from 1;7 to 2;00. All the material is available through CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000). Table 1 provides a list of the 16 children together with information concerning the

age-range, the number of files available, the total number of utterances, the total number of NNCs and, finally, the number of NNCs selected for the analysis. The Table shows that NNCs are only produced by 11 children. The non-occurrence of the target structures in the production of the other children does not necessarily imply that they did not reach the two word stage of language development. While in some cases the child produces only one word utterances (e.g., Delfina), in others the child’s production comprises both one word and three word utterances (e.g., Federica) and the absence of NNCs may thus come from the limited size of the transcript. Table 1: Description of the corpus

Child Age Range Files Utterances NNCs Corpus

Claudia 1;11-2;00 2 332 0 0

Davide 2;00 1 173 0 0

Delfina 1;8-2;00 5 438 0 0

Diana 1;8-2;00 6 1294 1 1 Elisa 1;10-2;00 8 1094 0 0

Federica 1;7-2;00 2 358 0 0

Francesco 1;7-1;8 3 495 23 9

Gregorio 1;7-2;00 8 1120 12 6

Linda 1;8-2;00 2 581 6 0

Lorenzo 1;8 2 800 5 2

Marco 1;7-2;00 15 5846 45 12

Martina 1;7-2;00 8 2381 12 7

Raffaello 1;7-2;00 7 1407 7 1

Rosa 1;7-2;00 7 2031 8 3

Veronica 1;7-2;00 3 575 13 3

Viola 1;11-2;00 4 780 8 2

Total 83 19705 140 46

As the comparison between the penultimate and ultimate column shows, not all

NNCs were included in the analysis. The types of NNCs which were excluded are listed below together with a short explanation of the reason behind the exclusion:

� unclear utterances. For example, we were not able to identify what dea in (i) refers to. The context provides no clue.

(i) dea babbo ‘? dad’ (Viola 2;1) � repetitions, i.e., utterances echoing a previous one, produced by the child herself (as in (ii)) or by an adult (parent or observer).

(ii) CH: azza chicco ‘stocking grain’ (Rosa 2;1) OBS: cosa ha detto? ‘what did she say?’ CH: azza chicco ‘stocking grain’

� absence of semantic relations between the two nouns. By means of (iii), the child asks for a pot from her mother. Thus, mamma is a vocative. On the other hand, iv) is a list of words denoting different objects in the context. In both cases, the two nouns are independent units from a syntactic, semantic and phonological point of view.

(iii) pentola, mamma ‘pot mother’ (Martina 2;1) (iv) callo temello ‘horse camel’ (Lorenzo 1;8)

� lexicalized compound words. The NNC is an unanalyzable chunk and plausibly does not involve any process of word combination.

(iv) pesce palla ‘puffer-fish’ (Marco 1;7)

Finally, in line with the arguments introduced in Section 1, we took into account only entity-denoting NNCs.

1.2. The coding The analysis aims to identify which semantic, syntactic, and phonological features are exhibited by NNCs. Thus, the labeling of the material was structured into three different layers.

The semantic analysis consisted in designating the head of the NNC (i.e., the hypernym of the entity denoted by the NNC as a whole) and labeling the NNC according to which semantic relation holds between the head and the non-head noun. The semantic head of NNCs was identified by relying on contextual factors. For example, (12) is uttered by Marco to refer to a tower made out of cards and accordingly, ‘tower’ is taken to be the head of the combination. As for the semantic relations, we distinguished the following three types, basing on the list in Jackendoff (2009) and focusing on those that have been shown to be attested in child language (see, e.g., Clark 2009):

POSSESSION (alienable in (11) and inalienable in (12))

(11) corona principessa ‘crown princess’ (Marco 1;7) (12) carte torre ‘cards tower’ (Marco 1;7)

LOCATION (13) scala bimbo ‘stair child’ (Martina 1;8)

CLASSIFICATION

(14) tazzina caffè ‘cup coffee’ (Martina 1;10)

It has to be noticed that Italian makes no overt grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. Nevertheless, at this pre-theoretical stage, we decided not to reject the idea that these two cognitive categories might play a role in children’s early production. Part/whole (as in (12)) and kinship relations are prototypical cases of inalienable possession (see, e.g., Barker 1995).

As for the syntactic layer, we labeled each NNC according to whether its semantic head is the leftmost (H1) or the rightmost noun (H2), as is exemplified in (15) and (16) respectively. The former is uttered by Gregorio to refer to his shoes and the latter by Martina to denote her aunt’s tractor.

(15) scarpe Lolò ‘shoes Gregorio’ (Gregorio 1;8) (16) zia trattore ‘aunt tractor’ (Martina 1;9) The phonological analysis was carried out to show which of the two nouns

carries the main stress. Along the lines of Alfano (2006), we considered duration and pitch as the main correlates of stress in Italian (see also Bertinetto 1981 on duration). We thus extracted the f0 contour of each NNC and, for each of the two nouns, we measured: a) the mean pitch; b) the ratio between the duration of the stressed syllable and that of the whole word. Furthermore, we considered if a pause occurred between the two nouns.

2. Results

2.1. The syntax and semantics of NNCs Table 2: Production frequency of H1 vs. H2 patterns per each child

Chi

ld

Dia

na

Fran

cesc

o

Gre

gorio

Lore

nzo

Mar

co

Mar

tina

Raf

fael

lo

Ros

a

Ver

onic

a

Vio

la

Tot

al

H1 0 6 4 1 7 2 0 0 2 1 23 H2 1 3 2 1 5 5 1 3 1 1 23

Table 2 shows the results of the syntactic analysis. There is an equal number of left-headed and right-headed NNCs. Moreover, the use of H1 and H2 does not vary significantly across children (χ2 p >.05), which suggests that both word orders can occur in the production of NNCs. Figure 1: Frequency of the three semantic relations and the two syntactic schemas

Figure 1 provides information about the main semantic features of NNCs. The histogram shows that the great majority of NNCs expresses the relation of possession, which is in line with what has been claimed in most of the literature on early multi-word utterances (see Introduction). Relations of location and classification are attested too, but to a significantly lesser degree.

Looking at the simultaneous distribution of the syntactic and the semantic categories, the data exhibit no significant correlation between the use of a certain syntactic schema and the expression of a certain semantic relation (χ2 p > .005). In other terms, all semantic relations can be conveyed by left-headed and right-headed NNCs without distinction.

2.2. Alienable and inalienable possession In Figure 2, the results concerning the possession relation are decomposed according to the type of possession (alienable vs. inalienable) and to the syntactic schema involved.

Figure 2: Frequency of the two types of possession (alienable vs. inalienable) and of the two syntactic schemas

While alienable possession is expressed by both H1 and H2 combinations without any significant difference, inalienable possession tends to be associated with the H2 schema. Although based on few data, this finding suggests that children’s production is sensitive to the alienable vs. inalienable distinction. This is not surprising, under the hypothesis that at the stage of language acquisition at issue here, children do not fully master the grammar of possession and the expression of this category is more likely to be grounded on cognitive principles than in the adult grammar (see discussion in 3.3).

2.3. The phonological analysis It should be premised that the phonological analysis rests on few data (7 H2 and 7 H1 NNCs), due to the difficulty in the availability of the corpus CHILDES file audios. However, the results reveal interesting patterns that are worth discussing.

Figure 3 and Figure 4 are prototypical examples of the prosodic structure associated with H1 and H2 NNCs respectively.

Figure 3: Pitch contour of the NNC zina caltè (tazzina caffè ‘cup coffee’)

Figure 4: Pitch contour of the NNC pappa gnino (pappa cucchiaino ‘pap spoon’)

The figures provide evidence that H1 NNCs are produced with a pause between

the two words. In the case considered in Figure 3, the pause is relatively long, being more than 450 ms. More generally, the average duration of the pause between the two words amounts to more than 240 ms.

On the contrary, the pitch contour of all the analyzed H2 NNCs is not interrupted by any pause. For example, in Figure 4 the utterance is produced as a single prosodic unit.

Another generalization that can be drawn from the phonological analysis of H2 NNCs concerns the difference in the degree of prominence between the two nouns.

zina caltè

pause

75

500

200

300

400

Pitc

h (H

z)

Time (s)0 1.906

0 0.910536561untitled

pappa gnino

75

500

200

300

400

Pitc

h (H

z)

Time (s)0 2.265

0.82845399 2.265005untitled

The histograms in Figure 5 and Figure 6 indicate that the leftmost noun in a H2 combination exhibits a higher level of pitch (t=2.82, df=8, p<.005) and a greater duration of the accented syllable (t=2.57, df=8, p<.005) – expressed as ratio between the duration of the stressed syllable and that of the whole word – than the rightmost one. Interestingly, this generalization does not extend to H1 NNCs, in which both words have the same degree of prominence, as the observation of the pitch contour in Figure 3 suggests. Figure 5: Comparison between the mean pitch values of the two words for each H2 NNC under analysis

Figure 6: Comparison between the duration of the accented syllable in the two words for each H2 NNC under analysis

In light of these data, our analysis might be able to account for the following three questions: i) why do H2 NNCs exhibit main stress on the leftmost noun?; ii) why do H2 NNCs tend to express inalienable possession?; iii) why are H1 NNCs always uttered with a pause between the two nouns?

Before sketching our proposal, however, we will spend a few words on the hypothesis on language acquisition that lies at the basis of the following analysis.

3. The analysis

3.1. The economy of acquisition hypothesis and early NP representation

In the relevant literature (Lebeaux 1988, Vainikka 1993/1994, Roeper 1992, 1998), there is a well-established consensus on a general version of the ‘economy of acquisition hypothesis’. Specifically, psycholinguistic evidence converges on the fact that children tend to avoid early commitment to the representation of functional structure, but start instead with minimal (presumably, lexical) structure projected in a domain (see, a.o., Gavarró et al. 2006). Alternatively, it has been claimed that functional projections are indeed available in child language, even if they come in an ‘underspecified’ form (see Clahsen et. al. 1996 and Penke et al. 2004 for convincing psycholinguistic evidence in favor of this idea). According to both approaches, however, this is tantamount to saying that ‘extended’ nominal projections (in Grimshaw’s 2000 sense) are indeed not fully represented at the very early stages of language acquisition, but that children might stick to impoverished nominal representations.

Some evidence along these lines of analysis comes from two preliminary studies that we conducted on the production of some children in the Calambrone corpus (CHILDES).

Firstly, we monitored Martina’s production over a period of 4 months (1;7-2;1), in order to analyze her use of definite and indefinite articles in obligatory contexts. We noticed that in 80-90% of cases both definite and indefinite articles are omitted in obligatory contexts. A significant increase is observed only after the age of 2, confirming that before this age Italian children do not fully master articles, as has been argued in other studies concerning the acquisition of DP structure in Italian (see, e.g., Pizzuto & Caselli 1992, Bottari, et al. 1994, Antelmi 1997).

The second pilot study targets the emergence of the number feature in Italian nouns. Following a previous study by Marinis (2003) on the emergence of number in Greek noun phrases, we identified all the instances of plural nouns in the production of the children in the Calambrone corpus and looked for the concomitant presence of the corresponding singulars. We observed a high degree of occurrence of only-plural forms, which might be taken as an indication that the instances of plural found at this stage are unanalyzed forms, e.g., acquired as lexical chunks, rather than being the expression of a transparent and productive morpho-syntactic process.

Summing up, there is consistent empirical evidence on the use of determiners and number, coming from previous studies and partially supported by the present corpus study, showing that these categories are not fully mastered in very early child language. This evidence could be taken to prove that functional categories in general are not fully represented at the very early stages of language acquisition but progressively emerge at later stages (along the traditional lines of Radford 1988, 1991 and Gleitman et al. 1988) 4.

3.2. H2 combinations as an instance of adjunction In this section we put forward the results starting from NNCs dubbed here H2 because they have the rightmost element as the formal and semantic head.

In the previous section, we explained that children at this early stage arguably cannot master ‘extended’ nominal projections, but project instead impoverished syntactic representation of nominal phrases. When combined together, such NNCs would be the expression of a Merge operation targeting two symmetrical lexical projections, as represented in the structure in (17), corresponding to the NNC zia trattore.

(17) ? 3 NP NP

6 6 zia ‘aunt’ trattore ‘tractor’

Along a line of analysis commenced by Kayne (1994) and developed by Moro

(2000 and 2008), the configuration in (17) would violate a fundamental principle ruling syntactic derivation, i.e., antisymmetry. Antisymmetry is a PF-oriented interface principle that determines the mapping of syntactic hierarchy onto linear order; Kayne’s original formulation of the Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) capitalizes on the notion of a-symmetrical c-command (for the formulation below see Delfitto & Melloni 2009: 82):

“LCA: Given a phrase-marker M, be T the set of terminals in M, A the set of ordered pairs of non-terminals in M such that the first element of the pair asymmetrically c-commands the second, and d(A) the set of terminals contained in A. Then d(A) must be a linear ordering of T.”

In Kayne’s model, therefore, the configuration in (17) would be filtered out by

LCA because, being symmetrical, none of the two NPs asymmetrically c-commands the other, and the structure is doomed to crash at PF.5 Interestingly,

however, there is a case where a configuration such as (17) is indeed well-formed and this is what happens if it is interpreted as an adjunction structure. The reason lies in the fundamental distinction – introduced by May (1985) and adopted by Chomsky (1986) – between segments and categories. As Kayne (1994:16) clearly puts forward, the technical solution that allows interpretability at the interfaces of structures such as (17) is to restrict c-command relations to categories, while excluding segments. A similar analysis could be applied to avoid the crash at PF of the derivation in (17), that is, (17) is antisymmetrical if it represents an adjunction structure where either NP1 or NP2 asymmetrically projects. Consider the case in (18): while NP1 c-commands NP2, the reverse relation does not hold since the latter is a segment of the complex category NP2 and is accordingly unable to c-command another constituent.

(18) NP2 3

NP1 NP2 6 6 zia ‘aunt’ trattore ‘tractor’ As explained in the Introduction, right-headed nominal structures are

unexpected in child Italian productions since the input prevalently consists of left-headed NPS (as in the abovementioned cases of possessive postnominal genitives, e.g. il trattore della zia ‘the tractor of the aunt’), with the notable exception of prenominal possessive adjectives (il mio trattore, lit. ‘the my tractor’). Therefore, a desirable result of this rationale is the right-headedness which is actually observed in our data, since the c-commanding constituent (NP1) – under the LCA analysis – results in being linearized as the leftmost element in H2 combinations.

Furthermore, this solution delivers an interesting semantic correlate. Semantically, adjunction encodes a modification relation; it is the adjoined NP that gets interpreted according to the predicative structure of the projecting NP. Given the nature of the elements involved therein, the prediction is that any conceptually salient logical relation might be legitimated by this kind of structures, modulo the lexical semantics and pragmatic/encyclopedic knowledge associated with the NNCs at issue. For example, we argued that possessives in child language might be associated with pragmatic and context-dependent interpretations (see the Introduction). The reason is straightforward: given the absence of active grammatical features able to coerce the interpretation in syntax, constraints on interpretation are left to the semantic-pragmatic interface, rather than being grammatically encoded6. Concerning the NNCs at stake, the limitation to the three interpretive values here attested (possessive, locative and classificatory) could be explained as a byproduct of the strong conceptual saliency of these relations, which

are in general the most accessible at this stage of language acquisition, as mentioned in Section 2.

In the Introduction, we mentioned that a case showing suggestive resemblance to Italian H2 structures is found in the domain of acquisition of possessive NPs in Hebrew. In adult Hebrew, the possession relation is encoded by a prepositional phrase in which the possessee precedes the possessor (e.g., sefer shel Yael ‘book of Yael’). Yet, data from Armon-Lotem (1998) suggest that children acquiring possessive nominal structures pass through a stage in which the (bare) possessor precedes the possessee (e.g., Yael sefer ‘Yael book’, see (5) above), as in the abovementioned case of Italian. Therefore, we propose to extend to these data our analysis of Italian H2 NNCs as adjunction structures (contra the analysis given in (10) in the Introduction)7. Incidentally, if our line of investigation is correct, Hebrew H2 structures could encode a number of different semantic relations apart from possession, in line with what has been argued for their Italian counterparts. In the following stage, Hebrew children start producing structures in which the possessee precedes the possessor, in compliance with the word order found in the input data. Only in the last stage, however, do they start using the full form of free genitive, with correct word order and genitive marker shel (comparable to English of or Italian di). This is what presumably happens later on in child Italian too, but our corpus data - restricted to the range 1;7 - 2;00 – do not consistently show di insertion8.

There is a different class of data that is worth mentioning in virtue of the strong parallelism arising with the H2 combinations at issue. We are introducing data from adult Germanic languages usually known as nominal ‘root compounds’, e.g. toilet paper, apron string. In English, in particular, these NN compounds exhibit a similar syntax, being right-headed and, at least superficially, lacking any functional element. English, and Germanic compounds in general, do not show traces of (meaningful) inflections or active grammatical features within their structure (putting aside linking elements or Fugenelementen, attested in most Germanic languages, on which we refer the reader to Delfitto et al. 2011). Besides superficial word order and lack of functional categories, English NN compounds and H2 structures in child Italian are also prosodically similar. As often remarked in the literature, English compounds are mainly left-stressed and are pronounced without a significant pause between their constituents. Interestingly, the odd resemblance between these left-stressed prosodic units in adult English and child Italian could find an explanation if they were both analyzed as the output of the same type of structure, whereby a nominal element (an NP or, maybe, a N°) is adjoined to another element, arguably sharing the same level of structural complexity. This resemblance at the prosodic level capitalizes on the similarity, at the morphosyntactic level, between the constituents, interpretable as minimal NPs lacking functional elements (it’s not a case that English compounds are dubbed as ‘root’ compounds, given the morpho-syntactic nature of the elements involved).

We leave for further research why adjunction is later abandoned in favor of other syntactic strategies in child (and adult) Italian, where NN compounds are morphological and semantically dissimilar from Germanic languages. We advance the hypothesis that the explanation might lie in the morpho-syntactic makeup of the lexical elements available in Italian (and Romance) vs. English9.

3.3. H1 combinations and the Figure-Ground asymmetry Likewise for NNCs of the H2 type, the present analysis capitalizes on prosodic cues for interpreting the underlying structure of the class of NNCs instantiating the H1 schema (e.g. corona principessa, ‘crown princess’). Specifically, we have shown that the main prosodic distinction between H1 and H2 NNCs lies in a pause between the constituents, only attested in the former group; we now intend to argue that this pause indicates the presence of an underlying unspelled constituent.

If we build up hierarchical structure basing on the linear sequence N1-Ø-N2 (in compliance with LCA and assuming no instances of movement), we obtain that the first merge does not presumably target the two nominal elements directly, but a noun and a phonologically null element, indicated as X° in the schema in (19). Interpreting the null element as a head, the result is either a basic X-bar configuration where NP2 is the complement and NP1 the specifier or the adjunct of the head (recall that there is no distinction between adjuncts and specifiers in Kayne’s model); or alternatively a projection of N1, where N1° takes XP as its complement, as in (20).

(19) XP 3 NP1 XP 6 3 corona ‘crown’ X° NP2

Ø 6 principessa ‘princess’

(20) NP1 3 N°1 XP corona ‘crown’ 3 X° NP2

Ø 6 principessa ‘princess’

Abstracting away for the moment from the precise nature of this structure10, the crucial issue concerns the categorial and semantic nature of the X° element. To answer this question, we underpin two kinds of evidence. The first one comes from acquisition data showing that instances of all lexical categories are produced at this stage, with the exception of semantically light prepositions, such as the Italian di, a, da, etc. These prepositions are those that most resemble functional categories and are introduced later on in child Italian11. Another crucial property of the H1 schema is the range of interpretive values that it can encode, which do not significantly differ from those expressed by H2 combinations, putting aside inalienable possession relations for the moment (which will be considered below).

On these grounds, we wish to argue that the null element connecting N1 and N2 is a preposition, which – like all spatial adpositions – could be characterized as introducing an asymmetric relation between a Figure and a Ground. Basing on Talmy (2000) and Svenonius (2007), we define the Figure as the entity, object, or substance which is located or in motion, whereas the Ground is a reference entity, one that has a stationary setting relative to a reference frame, with respect to which the Figure’s path, site, or orientation is characterized.

This cognitive schema is thus the perfect candidate for the encoding of location relations, i.e. one of the meaning values of the NNCs at issue. However, it has been noticed that there is a close correlation between location and possession (see the Introduction and references cited therein). Accordingly, we argue that children adopt the Figure-Ground schema for encoding both location and possession relations. The restricted use of this schema for the expression of the third meaning value, i.e. the classification relation (e.g. posto leone “the place of/for the lion”), is also not surprising under the view that it approaches possession, at least on the basis of a metaphorical interpretation of the concept.

With respect to the H2 schema, where constrains on the interpretation are left to the semantic-pragmatic component, it is worth observing that in the H1 pattern there is a syntactic pre-encoding of semantic values. Specifically, as argued in Svenonius (2007), the complement of a preposition is always the Ground; hence, the preposition is able to constrain the interpretation of its complement (for discussion on the role of the Figure in PPs, we refer the reader to Svenonius, ibid.). Crucially, this fact might be able to explain our challenging data about inalienable possession. As a matter of facts, we have found that inalienable possession is preferably encoded in H2 structures, but why should children prefer to adopt the adjunction strategy to express inalienable possession? We argue that resort to H2 is expected under the view that the Figure-Ground schema is not suitable for the expression of inalienable possession relations. In such cases, in fact, the possessed entity, i.e. the Figure, is not alienable and hence not ‘movable’ against a Ground possessor, as normally the Figure is in Figure-Ground relations. Therefore, to express whole-part or kinship relations, children could opt for the default strategy (H2), since no semantic constraints preclude its use, as has been already said. 12

To conclude, it is worth stressing that the present analysis rests upon the intuition that, at a very early stage, the child adopts a category holding an intermediate status between a spatial/lexical preposition and a case assigner. Resort to this category is arguably a first step towards the case assigning property of functional prepositions in Italian, and it is crucial at this stage to establish asymmetry both at the syntactic level (necessary for interface-interpretability on the basis of LCA), and at the semantic level by means of the cognitively basic Figure-Ground schema.

4. Conclusive remarks The rationale outlined in the previous section rests essentially upon the phonological features of the two word orders, H1 and H2; on the grounds of considerations regarding main stress assignment and prosodic pattern, we argued that the H1 and H2 NNCs actually embody different syntactic strategies.

On the prosodic level, we observed that H1 combinations always occur with a pause between the two words, while H2 combinations are realized as prosodic units and, additionally, exhibit primary stress on the first noun. In both cases, however, the present account of NNCs implies more syntactic structure than it appears at the surface (contra the ‘cognitive-pragmatic’ approaches presented in the Introduction). Specifically, H2 NNCs are an instance of adjunction, here interpreted as a default strategy that child Italian – and possibly all child languages – can resort to in order to conform to the antisymmetry requirement on syntactic structure. Arguably, in all child languages the H2 pattern – if attested within the same acquisition domain and at the same acquisition stage – might be the expression of this default strategy, characterized by absence of movement and of functional categories. H1 NNCs underlie a more complex structure, since they include a mediating preposition able to realize an asymmetrical Figure-Ground configuration. Further research is needed in order to evaluate the potential cross-linguistic validity of this strategy.

Crucially, however, in both cases our account excludes the projection of functional categories and feature-triggered movement. Hence, our line of investigation seems to support the ‘economy of acquisition’ approach. Furthermore, it provides empirical and theoretical evidence suggesting that antisymmetry is a fundamental property of UG on the basis of acquisition data.

A final comment concerns the relation between NNCs in child and adult language. It has often been claimed that children speaking Germanic varieties start to be productive in compound formation by far earlier than their Romance peers (e.g., Dressler et al. 2003). If our line of investigation is correct, however, NN ‘compounds’ of the Germanic type would emerge at the same age in both groups. Children speaking Romance varieties would start producing NN compounds of the

Romance type (i.e., constructed with an intermediate preposition, such as tazzina da caffè ‘cup P coffee’) at later stages of acquisition. Plausibly, early NNCs instantiating the H1 schema anticipate these constructions.

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                                                                                                                         1  Acknowledgements: We are deeply in depth to Birgit Alber, Denis Delfitto and Anna Gavarró for their helpful suggestions during the development of the analysis. We also thank the audience at Romance Turn V (Lisbon) and RALFe 2 (Paris), and the two anonymous reviewers, whose stimulating comments helped to improve this paper significantly. This work would not have been possible without the support of the Fondazione Stella Maris in Calambrone (Pisa) which provided us with the materials for the phonological analysis. Co-authorship:   The authors jointly developed this paper. For academic purposes, however, Jacopo Torregrossa takes responsibility for Introduction, sections 1 and 2, and Chiara Melloni takes responsibility for sections 3 and 4. 2 (1)-(3) are taken from Clark (2009: 157), (4) comes from our corpus (see Section 2.1) and (5) from Armon-Lotem (1998). 3 The literature provides a third approach to handle with the phenomenon of two word utterances. On the basis of distributional evidence, it has been claimed that children’s words could be divided into two groups: pivots and content words. It could be argued that NNCs stem from the combination of a pivot with a content word. However, this approach does not fit well with the data, since the two nouns in each NNC do not differ significantly in their distribution. As a matter of facts, Braine (1963), who has originally introduced this kind of

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         analysis, reports that pivots are usually expressed by words like no, more, again or it (see also Tomasello 2003 on pivot-schemas). 4 Counterevidence to this claim can be found in comprehension studies: Shipley et al. (1969) and Petretic & Tweeney (1976), for instance, show that young children understand grammatical English sentences significantly more often than sentences in which the function morphemes are deleted or substituted by wrong ones. In general however, proven sensitivity to function morphemes seem to emerge after the age of two years. 5 But see Moro (2008) for a different explanation, according to which neither of the two NPs could project its label to the dominating node (as indicated by the question mark in the representation (17)), in virtue of the fact that label projection can only take place when a head combines with a non-head. 6 See Delfitto & Melloni (2009) for a similar analysis of root NN compounds in Germanic languages. This line of analysis is consistent with Ramchand & Svenonius’s (2008), who argue that intra- and cross-linguistic semantic variation can be explained by general conceptual mechanisms, specifically in the absence of syntactically pre-encoded semantic information. 7  An anonymous reviewer observed that the present rationale of H2 structures approaches Armon-Lotem’s (1998) analysis of right-headed NNCs in Child Hebrew. However, it is worth stressing that our explanation hinges on the absence of functional structure within the derivation of H2 NNCs, where adjunction is a default strategy to avoid the crash at the interfaces of otherwise parallel structures. Armon-Lotem (1998: 28), instead, proposes that right-headed NNCs in Hebrew instantiate specifier-head configurations, where the possessor sitting in the specifier receives inherent genitive case. Therefore, the difference between the two accounts lies in the role played by functional categories. 8 As for Hebrew children, the timing of each stage varies from child to child. For example, Smadar’s stages have been established at 1;6, 1;7 and 1;10. On the contrary, Leor’s stages are much closer to each other, being at 1;9;04, 1;9;17 and 1;10. We refer to Armon-Lotem (1998: 23) for further details. 9 We allude here to the obligatory marking of declension class and (related) gender features in Romance nouns and adjectives, whereas English does not morphologically encode these features. 10 A principled choice between (19) and (20) depends on the capability of prepositions (see infra) to project specifiers, a theoretical issue that clearly goes beyond the limits of the present research. 11 Theoretically speaking, adpositions in general have an ambiguous status, approaching functional categories in many respects, see Baker (2003). However, from an acquisition perspective, Goldin-Meadow et al. (1976), Nelson (1974), Bowerman (1976), Dromi (1987) reveal that spatial prepositions are acquired very early. By the age of two and a half, English children produce a respectable stock of spatial prepositions. 12 Another piece of empirical evidence in support of our explanation comes again from root NN compounds in adult English. It is notorious that these right-headed compounds can encode inalienable possession relations (i.e. table leg, apron string, etc.), while the expression of alienable possession is realized by more complex (genitive) structures. We acknowledge an anonymous reviewer for this observation.