Featural Relativized Minimality in silence: the acquisition of sluicing in Italian

This paper investigates the acquisition of elliptical indirect wh-questions, i.e. sluicing, by Italian preschool children. The goal is to determine whether the locality principle of featural Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 2013, 2018) applies independently of lexicalization, thereby constraining children’s comprehension of sluicing according to the featural distinctness hierarchy (Rizzi 2018). Adopting Merchant’s (2001) structural approach to ellipsis, we designed three related experiments. Experiment 1 compares the comprehension of lexical and sluiced indirect wh-questions, aiming at verifying the presence of the subject>object asymmetry well-documented in the acquisition studies of other A'-dependencies. A subject advantage is detected in both elliptical and non-elliptical questions. To verify the role of fRM according to the distinctness hierarchy, Experiments 2 and 3 focus on sluiced sentences and modulate the featural overlap between the wh-remnant and the other unpronounced DP in the sluices. We manipulated Lexical Restriction (Experiment 2) and Number feature (Experiment 3). Our findings further confirm the subject>object asymmetry and, more crucially, demonstrate that children’s difficulties with object sluices are alleviated in disjunction (Experiment 2) and intersection (Experiment 3) configurations compared to inclusion configurations, as predicted under the locality principle. We therefore conclude that fRM regulates the acquisition of dependencies independently of their PF-realization. Orthogonally, our study corroborates an analysis of sluicing in terms of full-fledged interrogative structures isomorphic to their antecedent (e.g. Merchant 2001).