TESTING ROMANIAN-SPEAKING CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE OF ACCESSIBILITY THEORY IN SUBJUNCTIVE COMPLEMENTS

This paper discusses Romanian-speaking children's interpretation of null and overt pronouns in subordinate subjunctive clauses. More precisely, it investigates whether typically-developing children within the age range of 5-6 years ascribe different interpretations to null versus overt embedded subject pronouns in the presence of two overt NP antecedents in the preceding discourse. The theoretical model we draw on is Accessibility Theory, as defined by Ariel (1990). Previous work (Cotfas 2012) has demonstrated the impact of Accessibility Theory on reference establishment for adult speakers of Romanian. Our study sets out to test the hypothesis that children also use Accessibility Theory and they pattern the behaviour previously established for adults.