The Acquisition of Aspect in L1Italian

Italian seems to pattern with languages that encode telicity in the features of the direct object. Anyway, we need to add few considerations about the lexical properties of the intransitive verbs, which can be inherently +/-telic independently of the presence of a direct object. The syntactic characteristics of the argument projected in the verb phrases are crucial, but also the semantic feature of the lexical items involved in the verb derivation can also be relevant. On grammatical aspect side, the perfective morphology can be applied to all verb classes independently of their lexical aspect. In this paper, the acquisition of perfective morphology is investigated. The effect of the (a)telicity of verbs in the development of perfective morphology is examined in Child Italian. The hypothesis is that compositional telicity is acquired earlier than the lexical aspect as it results by the semantic of the lexical items that enter into the derivation, since the syntactic generalizations are easier to acquire than the semantic idiosyncratic properties. Perfective morphology should show particular properties in interaction with verbs whose lexical aspect is not given. The second section is devoted to the analysis of the characteristics of aspect in Italian, while the third section is dedicated to the background theories on the acquisition of aspect. In the fourth section the data are presented: an analysis of the appearance of perfective morphology in the spontaneous speech, and two experimental tasks on the production and comprehension of the perfective morphology with different verb classes. In the last paragraph the data are discussed and a developmental analysis of the acquisition of aspect is given