Contextualising Corpora in Testing Grammatical Hypothese: Searcing for proposed and Postposed Syntactic subjects in North Italian and Veneto Child-Adult Conversations

Abstract. 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 and fifteen years later Valian reconsidered the problem in the Government and Binding approach. By defending our approach, 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 that must be constantly taken into consideration in searching for syntactic Subjects in children's utterances.