Valence-changing operations in the second language: Comparing English and Serbian learners of Italian

This paper deals with the acquisition of Italian verbal reflexives by native speakers of English and Serbian. The focus is on clitic-marked reflexive forms, which are treated as unaccusative, and which for this reason cannot appear in constructions with derived subjects. In addition, direct clitic reflexives cannot take a syntactic object, as the object position is semantically occupied. Results are reported from an empirical study aimed at exploring how these two requirements are acquired by second language learners whose native languages differ in (not) having reflexive clitics. The data indicates that the English learners initially have more problems than the Serbian ones, but that both L1 groups have correct intuitions at the advanced proficiency level, presumably in virtue of the guidance of Universal Grammar.