On the status of subject clitics in Child French

The syntactic status of subject clitics in French, and in Romance more generally, has been amply discussed in the literature. There is general agreement that in standard / written French, subject clitics are arguments, or "true " subjects. A sentence like (1a) would have at some level of representation a structure like (1b), in which il is the syntactic subject and Pierre appears in a dislocated position (Kayne 1975, Burzio 1986, Rizzi 1986, Brandi & Cordin 1983/1986).1 But a number of recent papers have claimed that nominative clitics in spoken French do not have an argumental status but should rather be analyzed as inflectional elements, more specifically agreement markers that are prefixed t