a-Topics in Italian/Romance and the Cartography of Children’s Inventions

Abstract The paper has a specific and focused aim: to unveil a possible route to DOM, the crosslinguistically widely attested phenomenon whereby direct objects are introduced by a preposition, with interpretive constraints. The prepositional marker is ‘a’ in Italian and in (the majority of) Romance. The investigation is based on both comparative data from Romance and on some relevant experimental results from the acquisition of Italian involving a-Topics. The insights that syntactic cartography may provide on the characterization of such route is the leading note of the investigation: a-marking starts out on direct objects topics, only occurring when the (animate) direct object is preposed in the left periphery of the clause; then a-marking involves clause internal direct object topics in the vP-periphery; and finally a-marking is Case related in the small ‘v’ spine; the latter, is also implicated in causatives and in constructions involving benefactive arguments. The acquisition results reviewed indicate the use of left peripheral a-Topics in children’s elicited productions in Italian, which are not attested in the target language, thus illustrating a cartographically defined space of children’s grammatical creativity.