Changing the topic in question-answer pairs: a production study on the use of subject, topicalization and passive in Italian

Abstract

The present study deals with the production of discourse-related structures, and in particular it focuses on the use of (lexical vs null) subjects, topicalized structures with clitic pronouns (e.g. Subject-Cl-Verb) and passives in Italian-speaking children (aged from 4- to 9-year-old), as well as in adults. Three eliciting questions, associated with transitive actions, manipulated the discourse context by asking to talk about the agent, the patient or elicited an all-new description of the event. The production task enabled us to investigate the use of null vs overt lexical subjects, by contrasting the conditions in which the subject was new or given information in the question; second, we examined the way children and adults topicalize the patient. Results showed that both children and adults preferred the use of null subjects when the subject was given in the question, whereas they both opted for a lexical preverbal subject when it was new information. Children and adults, instead, sharply differed in the way they topicalized the patient: all children, also in the oldest group, preferred the use of topicalized structures with an active verb and a clitic pronoun referring to the topic patient; adults instead overwhelmingly opted for the passive. These results showed that the avoidance of passive in this specific eliciting context persisted even at a later stage in development.