Notes on Passive Object Relatives

Across languages, children are known to encounter difficulty, up to different ages depending on different languages, in the production of object relative clauses (OR), in contrast with their smooth production of Subject relatives (SR) (for discussion, Guasti & Cardinaletti (2003), Novogrodsky & Friedmann (2006), and references cited therein). In this paper I will develop a hypothesis as to what the source of the difficulty with the production of object relatives could be. I will address the issue from a particular angle, looking at the strategies that children put to work in their productions, when faced with the necessity to produce an object relative. Among them, a relatively widespread one is the production of what I will refer to as passive object relatives, namely a passive sentence + a subject relative. Here, I will focus my attention on this strategy more closely.