Lexical morphology

This stage begins to incorporate language-specific procedures. For the verb, categorial marking is achieved through a handful of diacritic markings, e.g. non-past vs. past (marked by -to); a -re marking (infinitival, in native speakers‘ use), which seems to work as a broad categorial marker for verbs; person marking, but restricted to one contrast only (either first vs. third person, or singular versus plural number). However limited, this would explain for instance why person marking seems to appear at an earlier stage in Italian than in English.

In the nominal area, categorial marking is achieved through the use of articles (mainly

la or il) preceding noun-like expressions. This interpretation would not consider the combination of noun and article as a case of ‗phrasal‘ morphology, independently of whether or not the specific combination turns out to be target-like. In fact ‗bare‘ nouns, except for citation forms, lists, or similar expressions, are not produced at early stages of Italian L2 development and are, in any case, highly restricted in native Italian. This is demonstrated in Tables 4(a) and 4(b), which show a longitudinal (one year apart) study with a total count of nouns and determiner combinations in one child learner, code- named Wade.

Further support for this interpretation comes from the fact that, from the prosodic point of view, the Italian article is not independent of the content word that follows but groups under its stress field. This, in turn, would favour a sort of formulaic learning of article-noun combination. For all these reasons, such combinations are hypothesised as belonging to the ‗lexical‘ level, in the sense that article forms are considered categorical

markers of nouns.

Nevertheless, in terms of form-function mapping, the article system is quite complicated, and is mastered rather late even in first language acquisition (cf. Pizzuto

and Caselli, 1992). We can therefore hypothesise a late acquisition in L2 learners as well. This is one of several cases in Italian morphology where the sheer complexities of form-function mapping will challenge the PT definition of ‗lexical‘ morpheme. While only the least marked markers – possibly the ‗default‘ and most frequent ones – might show up at the predicted stage, the full paradigm of otherwise ‗lexical‘ morphemes is acquired much later.

At this Stage 2, the plural -i diacritic turns out to be the only one to emerge in conjunction with plural referents. In my data, this appears more clearly at Time 2 (cf. Table 4b). Some gender marking also appears, but without agreement, as no exchange of information is predicted at this stage. This can be considered a default occurrence as it is, necessarily, restricted to a handful of nouns, since gender is idiosyncratic.

The emergence of combinations of nouns and numerals is also recorded as it is the earliest instance of the establishment of plural contexts. The demonstrative questo

(‗this‘) is also recorded when it emerges at Time 2. At this stage, it is the only

demonstrative that does emerge, six times in the same form: three times in the context of English nominals, twice with default masculine singular nominals, and once with a feminine singular. Thus it is not counted as a case of agreement.

Det+N Nm -o Nm -e Nm -a Nf -a Nf -e Npl -i Npl -e total IL (m/s) 18 tokens 5 1 6 3 3 12/18 LA 10 tokens 1 1 7 1 8/10 THE (English) 1 token 1 (papa) Ø 1 token 1 mucco* 1 L‘ 3 tokens 1 2 3/3 UN 7 tokens 6 1 7/7 UNA 2 tokens 2 2/2 UNO 0 tokens 0/0 DUE 3 tokens 1 (bambino) 1 (cane) 1 (bambini) 1/3

Table 4.a. Determiner (mainly article) and noun combinations. Informant Wade (child), T1. (Shaded areas represent forms which are non-native like)

Det+N English Lexeme Nm -o Nm -e Nm -a Nf -a Nf -e Npl -i Npl -e total IL (m/s) 10 tokens 2 4 3 1 9/10 LA 5 tokens 4 1 4/5 THE 3 tokens 2 1 3 Ø 0 tokens 0 L‘ 0 tokens 0 UN 10 tokens 5 4 1 9/10 UNA 3 tokens 3 3/3 UNO 3 tokens 3# (Vowel -#) 3/3 DUE 4 tokens 3 1 4/4 QUESTO 6 tokens 3 2 1 5/6

# Natives drop the end vowel of uno when the next word begins with a vowel.

Table 4.b. Determiner (mainly article) and noun combinations. Informant Wade (child), T2, c. 12 months after T1. (Shaded areas represent forms which are non-native like)

Only one single ‗bare noun‘ was produced. All other nouns (43/44) come in combination with an article, whether definite or indefinite, a numeral or a demonstrative. This reinforces the ‗lexical‘ hypothesis of article-noun combinations in early learners.

For this informant‘s production we can therefore infer that the article is a categorial marker of N (lexical) at this stage. That is, the learner has constructed a rule for Italian which requires that N must be preceded by a categorial marker, a numeric specifier, or both, as in (3). This is the case with this learner, even when the fillers are English, as in (4).

(3) il tre orsi come back. the three bears came back

(4) tre orsi . la mamma uh la papa e la piccolo uh la mamma makes the breakfast the porridge three bears the mother uh the father and the little uh the mother makes the breakfast the porridge.

Gloss: (There are) three bears: the mother, the father and the little one. The mother makes porridge for breakfast.

Leaving aside the issue of whether and how the ‗definiteness‘ feature may be marked, the marker il, ―the‖, which happens to be the masculine singular form in the target

language, seems to be best candidate for the default nominal marker, since it is produced with 18 nouns at Time 1 and with 10 at Time 2, that is 33% and 25% of the times. It also appears with the widest range of noun forms (gatto, leone, papa, mamma), including more complex phrasal constructions (il tre orsi, il papa bed). On the other hand, the marker la (also ―the‖, for feminine gendered nouns) also pops up fairly frequently (10 and 5 times respectively). But this form appears with a narrower lexical spread and seems to be phonologically triggered, as in (4), where la is fairly consistently in an #_____a# environment (la mamma) and may spread to neighbouring Ns. This tendency in my data to use il rather than la markers seems contrary to what happens with L2 development in ‗natural‘ environments, as well as in L1 development (Chini 1992, Pallotti 1998), and points to a possible effect of formal instruction.

The indefinite articles un, una (―a‖), and the numerals uno, due, ―one‖, ―two‖, seem to

be used more accurately than the L-specifiers. By Time 2, the numeral due is comfortably used in the context of plural noun forms.