A further possible answer to the eliciting questions of the experiment is a passive sentence, in which the topic is the subject, most likely a left dislocated subject resumed by a silent null subject pro (see Belletti & Manetti 2019: 24). In B&M, the passive answer was seldom selected by children, who instead preferred to clitic left dislocate the object in the active sentence. The 5-year-old group, however, did sometimes produce some passives, which were all realized in the form of si-causative passives.6 A question that is then potentially raised by the new manipulation in the experiment presented here is whether inanimacy of the topic has an effect on the possible use of si-causative passives by children.
Cambridge Active Grammar Level 2 Answer Key Pdf
In the one-topic condition, for which the question is reported in (8a), the appropriate answer would consist of sentences with an object clitic referring to the object topic and an active verb (and a lexical subject), i.e. Subject-Clitic-Verb (8b); alternatively, the passive (with by-phrase) could also be a felicitous answer (8c):
In the two-topic condition, instead, after the question in (9a), the object topics should be explicitly produced in the answers, thus yielding either a ClLD with the object overtly realized in the left periphery (and a lexical subject), in (9b), or a passive with an overtly expressed derived lexical subject (corresponding to the object topic in the active answer and a by-phrase corresponding to the subject of the active answer), (9c): 2ff7e9595c
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