New views on reflexivity: delay effects in acquisition, cross-modular Principle B and reflexive clitics in Romance

In this contribution, the authors intend to offer an interesting exemplification of the kind of positive interaction that may arise between acquisition studies and linguistic theory. Starting from a full range of comparative studies showing the presence of a delay in the acquisition of the interpretive properties of non-reflexive pronominals and the absence of such a delay in languages where clitic pronominals are involved, the authors argue that this range of effects is elegantly derived from a general constraint on extra-lexical operations of valency reduction, turning relations into one-place predicates. The analysis leads to a sort of cross-modular (re)interpretation of Principle B of Binding Theory and to a radically new analysis of the relation between (semantic) binding and coreference