The development of Italian as a second language

Italian is a nonconfigurational, null-SUBJ headmarking language characterised by a rich morphology and a flexible syntax which is highly sensitive to pragmatic and discourse choices.1 From the point of view of the effect of pragmatics on syntactic structure, Van Valin (2005: 77) locates Italian among languages with ‘flexible syntax and rigid focus’. English, on the other hand, is among languages with ‘rigid syntax and flexible focus’, which makes the contrast between the two languages intriguing. These typological characteristics are of interest to PT in two fundamental ways. First, with regards to the notion of transfer of grammatical information within and between phrases of a sentence (cf. ch. 1, § 4.1, this volume), Di Biase & Kawaguchi (2002) show that, despite the basic contrast with English, Italian interlanguage data fully validates the universal hypotheses about the development of morphological structures and their interaction with syntax as hypothesised in Pienemann (1998), who had not looked at any Romance languages. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, with regards to the LFG architecture of correspondences among its three parallel levels of linguistic representation, the need to account for the nonconfigurationality of Italian syntax contributed substantially to the formulation of PT’s hypotheses about the development of syntactic structures at the interface with discourse-pragmatics (cf. ch. 1, § 4.2, this volume). As a matter of fact, Di Biase & Kawaguchi (2002) pioneered the use of the newly formalised LFG DFs in PT, thus foreshadowing the extension later developed in Pienemann, Di Biase & Kawaguchi (2005). In what follows, unlike any previous treatments of Italian processability, we revisit and expand the morphosyntactic framework for Italian L2 development and propose a theoretically motivated way forward for dealing with the so-called intrastage phenomena (cf. § 2).We also offer a fairly comprehensive discussion of the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics, with empirical support (cf. § 3)