Regolarità sintattiche e pragmatiche nel linguaggio infantile

Aim of the paper is to highlight the relevance of discourse tools not only in controlling linguistic stipulations, but in capturing wider generalisations and in abstracting properties at sentence level. The research deals with the same corpus, collected in the seventies by Gianna Tirondola and concerning her conversations with six children in a diglossic situation, which has been investigated in two very different frameworks. First Fava and Tirondola analyzed some Subject properties in the Relational Grammar model. By defending a pragmatic approach, the grammatical criteria required for an appropriate interpretation of the 'syntactic' Subjects in Italian and Veneto early child language are rediscussed. I will argue, both on methodological and theoretical grounds, that that there are some discourse notions such as topic and focus that must be constantly taken into consideration in searching for syntactic Subjects in children's utterances.