The acquisition of adjectival ordering in Italian.

In this paper, we analyze the syntax of nominal expressions in a corpus of early child speech collected at the University Ca’ Foscari Venice. We focalize on the distribution of quantifiers, determiner-like adjectives, possessive adjectives, and descriptive adjectives. In adult Italian, these elements display a great degree of variation as regards word order. Comparing child production with both the input attested in our corpus and the data found in an electronic corpus of spoken Italian (Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato, LIP, De Mauro et al. 1993), we show that child competence mirrors the adult competence of the spoken register in both syntax and pragmatics and is expectedly deviant from more formal varieties which are usually also taken into account by linguistic literature. From a methodological point of view, we ground our analysis on a well-developed theoretical approach to nominal structure which enables us to make a qualitative analysis in the absence of a large amount of data, as is in fact the case of adjectival modification in child production.