Sì and no: How Italian children and adults answer positive and negative polar questions

There is cross-linguistic variation in the strategies languages use to answer polar questions. Specifically, languages differ in the type of answers that can be produced: only a response particle, only a continuation, or a combination of both. Among languages that allow response particles, there is further variation in how these are used to answer negative polar questions. In Positive-Negative languages, which Italian has been claimed to belong to, positive response particles are used to express positive polarity, whereas negative response particles mainly express negative polarity. This article experimentally investigates these two aspects of answers to polar questions in adult and child Italian. We do so by eliciting answers to both positive and negative polar questions and analyzing the type of answers that were given and their form. To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the answering system in both positive and negative polar questions in adult and child Italian. Our results from adults suggest that Italian is mostly, but not strictly, a Positive-Negative language. In addition, we show that 4- to 5-year-old Italian children are able to answer positive and negative polar questions, behaving in line with adults, although they have yet to fully acquire the ability to produce mandatory continuations in certain contexts. Lastly, as a corollary result, we show that our data experimentally support the validity of the markedness scale in adult and child Italian: some responses are more marked than others and are mapped to more specialized forms.