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Morphosyntactic development in Italian and its relevance to parameter-setting models: comments on the paper by Pizzuto & Caselli*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Nina Hyams
Nina Hyams*
Affiliation:
University of California at Los Angeles
*
University of California at Los Angeles, Linguistics Department, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA.
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Abstract

Pizzuto & Caselli (1992) claim that data from the morphosyntactic development of Italian-speaking children are inconsistent with nativist, parameter-setting models of language development. In the present Note it is argued that much of the data which Pizzuto & Caselli adduce is irrelevant to the specific hypotheses they are evaluating and that those data which are relevant fully support parameter-setting and linguistictheoretic models, contrary to their claims.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , October 1992 , pp. 695 - 709
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: a version of this paper was read at the Workshop on Crosslinguistic and Cross-population Contributions to the Theory of Acquisition, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, June 1991. I would like to thank the participants of that workshop, in particular, Vicki Fromkin, Yosi Grodzinsky, Teun Hoekstra and Yonata Levy. I would also like to thank the editor of the Journal of Child Language for giving me this opportunity to reply.

References

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