Does “Case” Matter in the Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Romanian?

Although both sentences in (1) and (2) contain a displaced element (e.g. the cat), the two structures differ as to the position of the gap inside the relative clause. In subject relative clauses such as (1), the position which the filler moves from is the syntactic subject of the relative clause (e.g. ‘the cat chases the mouse’). By contrast, in object relative clauses like (2), the filler is moved from the direct object position of the verb in the relative clause (e.g. ‘the dog chases the cat’). For children to produce and interpret relative clauses like those exemplified in (1) and (2) above, they must have both knowledge of movement operations and sufficient processing resources to compute the relevant syntactic dependencies. Research in various languages has shown that children have difficulties comprehending object relative clauses, but the cause of the difficulties is debated (Sheldon 1974, Tavakolian 1981, Hamburger and Crain 1982, for English; Adani et al. 2010, Arosio et al. 2010, for Italian; Guasti et al. 2008, for Greek; Arnon 2009, Friedmann et al. 2009, for Hebrew; Diessel and Tomasello 2005, for German). One plausible account is that object relatives are initially analyzed as subject relatives and later require a revision, which is problematic for children (Trueswell et al. 1999). This initial misanalysis occurs in many languages because the relative pronoun is ambiguous between subject relative and object relative. The present study investigates to what extent case disambiguation at the onset of the relative clause can prevent initial misanalyses and assist children’s comprehension by using a comparison between subject and object relative clauses in Romanian. Romanian provides an ideal testing ground because relative pronouns show overt case-marking in the Accusative and the Dative. In principle, this should offer a cue in identifying the structure of the relative clause and in correctly assigning the filler to the gap contained in the relative clause. The structure of the paper is as follows: In section 2 I will present an overview of the processing of relative clauses by adults and the early acquisition of such structures. Section 3