Adverbial hierarchy and verb movement in the early production of Italian children

This paper investigates the syntax of Italian adverbs and the placement of finite and non-finite predicates in children's early spontaneous speech, aiming at shedding light on the relationship between adverb syntax and verb movement in early language acquisition. We analyzed the syntax of 31 adverbs in the spontaneous speech of 17 monolingual Italian-speaking children, aged 1;04 to 3;04. We verified whether the placement of adverbs in children's early production obeys the adverbial hierarchy as proposed in Cinque (1999), and how high the predicate moves in the fine-grained array of clausal projections. Our findings reveal that children's use of adverbs adheres to the hierarchy of functional projections proposed in theoretical literature (Cinque 1999/2006) from an early stage. Furthermore, our results indicate that verb placement is established in a target-like manner from early on, consistent with prior acquisition research (Clahsen 1990, Guasti 1993), reaching a clausa-medial position compatible with that identified for adults (Schifano 2018). Overall, this work provides a fine-grained picture of the adverbial hierarchy and of the placement of finite and non-finite predicates in Italian children’s early productions.